> - make HZ tunable (sysctl?) for finer grained process switching
> on fast CPUs (where it could be increased from the default
> of 100 without adding too much clock interrupt overhead)
Making it a sysctl is not good as lots of constants would become
variables. On the other hand, changing HZ and just re-compiling
the kernel should be sufficient.
> - make the kernel code segment read only if possible (some
> architectures unfortunately need self modifying code) to
> catch bugs where bad pointers can damage the kernel code
> and cause various subtle and unrelated bugs to appear
This cannot be done in simple way as we use 4MB pages on Pentium.
> - free memory used by the FPU emulator code at kernel startup
> (like driver initialization code) if the emulator is not
> used (for Linux distributions, so that the same kernel
> image works on a 386 or 486SX but doesn't waste ~45K on
> real CPUs).
Non-trivial, but it could be possible to make the FPU emulator
a module (?).
Have a nice fortnight
-- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth "You might have mail."- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu