[fa.info-mac] Vertical Retrace

info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (08/20/84)

From: chavez@harvard.ARPA (R. Martin Chavez)

	Does anyone know why the Memory Manager shouldn't be
called by vertical-retrace tasks?

		R. Martin Chavez (chavez@harvard.ARPA)

info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (08/27/84)

From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
The Memory Manager should not be called during vertical retrace tasks
because it could trigger a heap compaction.  Imagine what that would
mean for an application which had just done the first step of
dereferencing a handle and, before following the pointer to the
actual data, was interrupted by a vertical retrace job which caused
a heap compaction and invalidated the pointer.

info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (08/27/84)

From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA>
	Does anyone know why the Memory Manager shouldn't be
	called by vertical-retrace tasks?

Probably because the Memory Manager isn't reentrant; if it happened to be in
the middle of an operation when a vertical-retrace interrupt happened, and the
retrace task called it too, its data structures would get trashed.  It just
wasn't designed for multitasking.
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