Reducing system calls overhead

[Henry Spencer]

In article <21606 at ccicpg.UUCP> goshen at ccicpg.UUCP (Shmuel Goshen) writes:
>I have been looking recently at ways to reduce the system call overhead.
>... introduce a simple and quick interface
>for "light weight" system calls (like getpid(), umask() etc'), which 
>perform simple tasks and never sleep...

Better profile your system load before putting a lot of effort into this.
Or look at the Bach&Gomes paper in the Spring 88 EUUG proceedings, which
observes that (after allowing for some oddities on their system) nearly
all system calls are file-system-related.  The light-weight calls you're
talking about simply don't occur frequently enough to be worth much effort.
-- 
Intel CPUs are not defective,  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
they just act that way.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu