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Didn't most old operating systems use cooperative multitasking? I remember, at least, that classic Mac OS (i.e. pre-OSX) didn't use preemptive multitasking, either.

Anyway, this SO answer[0] explains why early Linux, much like the hobby kernel in this article, used cooperative scheduling inside the kernel, and only preempted user-space stuff.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16766562




MacOS may have been a little late. Windows NT, OS/2, Linux did preemptive multitasking since beginning of 90s, even AmigaOS had it in the 80s.


Mac OS badly needed preemptive multitasking (and memory protection!), and got it when the NeXT bits were transformed into Mac OS X.


Thanks for the link!

I don't understand why this would be different for a Rust based OS..




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