From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: page faults References: <14356.37630.420222.582735@liveoak.engr.sgi.com> From: Marcus Sundberg Date: 26 Oct 1999 15:50:08 +0200 In-Reply-To: "William J. Earl"'s message of "Mon, 25 Oct 1999 10:27:26 -0700 (PDT)" Message-ID: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "William J. Earl" Cc: Linux MM List-ID: "William J. Earl" writes: > Eric W. Biederman writes: > ... > > If the hardware cannot support two processors hitting the region simultaneously, > > (support would be worst case the graphics would look strange) > > you could have problems. > ... > One could reasonably take the view that a threads-aware graphics library > should be thread-safe. That is, if the hardware needs to have concurrent > threads in a single process serialize access to the hardware, then the > library plugin for that hardware should do the required serialization. > > This of course the neglects the question of whether a broken > user-mode program could damage the hardware, but then a broken > single-threaded user-mode program, with no other programs using the > hardware, could just as easily damage the hardware. That is, if the > hardware is not safe for direct access in general, threading does not > make it any less safe. The hardware _is_ safe for direct access, but _not_ while the accelerator is running. //Marcus -- -------------------------------+------------------------------------ Marcus Sundberg | http://www.stacken.kth.se/~mackan/ Royal Institute of Technology | Phone: +46 707 295404 Stockholm, Sweden | E-Mail: mackan@stacken.kth.se -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/