Spl (Unix)
spl (short for set priority level, after the PDP-11 assembler instruction of the same name) is the name for a collection of Unix kernel routines or macros used to change the interrupt priority level. This was historically needed to synchronize critical sections of kernel code that should not be interrupted. Newer Unix variants which support symmetric multiprocessing now mostly use mutexes for this purpose, which is a more general solution, so multiple processors can execute kernel code at the same time. On older PDP-11 versions of Unix, there were eight of these routines, ranging from spl0 to spl7, each corresponding to one PDP-11 interrupt priority level, in addition to splx, which restores a previous priority level (returned by one of the other routines). On BSD Unix and its derivatives, these are called splhigh, splserial, splsched, splclock, splstatclock, splvm, spltty, splsofttty, splnet, splbio, splsoftnet, splsoftclock, spllowersoftclock, spl0, and splx. , the spl family ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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PDP-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer. The PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that made it much easier to program than earlier models in the PDP series. Further, the innovative Unibus system allowed external devices to be easily interfaced to the system using direct memory access, opening the system to a wide variety of peripherals. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time computing applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. The ease of programming of the PDP-11 made it very popular for general-purpose computing uses also. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project emphasizes "portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography." The OpenBSD project maintains portable versions of many subsystems as packages for other operating systems. Because of the project's preferred BSD license, many components are reused in proprietary and corporate-sponsored software projects. The firewall code in Apple's macOS is based on OpenBSD's PF firewall code, Android's Bionic C standard library is based on OpenBSD code, LLVM uses OpenBSD's regular expression library, and Windows 10 uses OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) with LibreSSL. The word "open" in the name OpenBSD refers to the availability of the operating system source code on the Internet, although the word "open" in the nam ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Interrupt Priority Level
The interrupt priority level (IPL) is a part of the current system interrupt state, which indicates the interrupt requests that will currently be accepted. The IPL may be indicated in hardware by the registers in a Programmable Interrupt Controller, or in software by a bitmask or integer value and source code of threads Overview An integer based IPL may be as small as a single bit, with just two values: 0 (all interrupts enabled) or 1 (all interrupts disabled), as in the MOS Technology 6502. However, some architectures permit a greater range of values, where each value enables interrupt requests that specify a higher level, while blocking ones from the same or lower level. Assigning different priorities to interrupt requests can be useful in trying to balance system throughput versus interrupt latency: some kinds of interrupts need to be responded to more quickly than others, but the amount of processing might not be large, so it makes sense to assign a higher priority to that ki ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Interrupt
In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, the processor will suspend its current activities, save its state, and execute a function called an ''interrupt handler'' (or an ''interrupt service routine'', ISR) to deal with the event. This interruption is often temporary, allowing the software to resume normal activities after the interrupt handler finishes, although the interrupt could instead indicate a fatal error. Interrupts are commonly used by hardware devices to indicate electronic or physical state changes that require time-sensitive attention. Interrupts are also commonly used to implement computer multitasking, especially in real-time computing. Systems that use interrupts in these ways are said to be interrupt-driven. Types Interrupt signals may be issued in response to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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IRQL (Windows)
An Interrupt Request Level (IRQL) is a hardware-independent means with which Windows prioritizes interrupts that come from the system's processors. On processor architectures on which Windows runs, hardware generates signals that are sent to an interrupt controller. The interrupt controller sends an interrupt request (or IRQ) to the CPU with a certain priority level, and the CPU sets a mask that causes any other interrupts with a lower priority to be put into a pending state, until the CPU releases control back to the interrupt controller. If a signal comes in at a higher priority, then the current interrupt will be put into a pending state; the CPU sets the interrupt mask to the priority and places any interrupts with a lower priority into a pending state until the CPU finishes handling the new, higher priority interrupt. Windows maps not only hardware interrupt levels to its internal interrupt table but also maps software interrupts. The mappings in this table are called Interrup ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Serializing Tokens
In computer science, serializing tokens are a concept in concurrency control arising from the ongoing development of DragonFly BSD. According to Matthew Dillon, they are most akin to SPLs, except a token works across multiple CPUs while SPLs only work within a single CPU's domain. Serializing tokens allow programmers to write multiprocessor-safe code without themselves or the lower level subsystems needing to be aware of every single entity that may also be holding the same token. Comparison with mutual exclusion (mutex) Tokens and mutual exclusion (mutex) mechanisms are locks. Unlike mutexes, tokens do not exclude other threads from accessing the resource while they are blocked or asleep. A thread sharing resources with other threads can be stopped and started for a variety of reasons: # Timeslicing: the user space (US) scheduler tries to ensure that all threads get a fair chance to run, so it runs each thread for a brief period of time (a timeslice) and then switches to ano ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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DragonFly BSD
DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003. Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together, sharing bug fixes, driver updates, and other improvements. Intended as the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series, DragonFly has diverged significantly from FreeBSD, implementing lig ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems. FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete system, i.e. the project delivers a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering a kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties for system software; FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license, as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux. The FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. A wide range of additional third-party applications may be installe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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NetBSD
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems. The NetBSD project focuses on code clarity, careful design, and portability across many computer architectures. Its source code is publicly available and permissively licensed. History NetBSD was originally derived from the 4.3BSD-Reno release of the Berkeley Software Distribution from the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, via their Net/2 source code release and the 386BSD project. The NetBSD project began as a result of frustration within the 386BSD developer community with the pace and direction of the operating system's development. The four founders of the NetBSD project, Chris Demetriou, Theo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Berkeley Software Distribution
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD. BSD was initially called Berkeley Unix because it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. Although these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in the 1990s by UNIX SVR4 and OSF/1, later releases provided the basis for several open-source operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin, and TrueOS ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Assembly Language
In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, ''Coding for A.R.C.''. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an ''assembler''. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book ''The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Com ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |