On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Simon Proven wrote:

> 
> >  Why then are the SCSI drivers so slow?
> 
> suffer because polling is fast under RISC OS, because you're always the
> foreground task when doing disc transfers.  Unix does it differently.
> 

  I thought, as it's the kernel doing the polling that it would always 
be the 'forground' task.

   I thought the kernel itself couldn't be preemptively multitasked in 
UNIX (at least not in NetBSD), so that when something sticks in the 
kerel, the whole machine hangs.

  Is this wrong?

Also the routines mentioned by Mark as possibly needing recoding to speed 
things up must be called with interrupts disabled, so I don't see how 
they could be interrupted.

  Confused yet again...
Ale.