In article <200212150537.gBF5bvL22895@kolvir.arlington.ma.us>,
John Kohl <jtk@kolvir.arlington.ma.us> wrote:
>Would it make sense on the i386 port not to use a GDT slot for a process
>which is not running or runnable?  If the TSS and LDT base slots are
>only used while the process is in the run state (and yielded when the
>process sleeps), we could theoretically support more processes.
>Complexity?  Performance impact of reloading GDT slots?  I don't know
>offhand...

Well, another way to do this, is to just do some accounting in the GDT
entries and when we run out, steal one from another process (policy to
choose the victim to be determined). This way we will not have such
limits, and the system will be able to run many more processes.

christos