[brandmeyer]

This is pretty much exactly the kind of robust system architecture that Erlang advocates employ.

In embedded systems, our kernels and threads are lightweight enough that we can go very fine-grained without paying a steep context-switching penalty. I'm not convinced that the penalty in Linux is all that high, either. Its only when you're going after the C10K (or C1M?) problem that you start to notice.

[aidenn0]

> In embedded systems, our kernels and threads are lightweight enough that we can go very fine-grained without paying a steep context-switching penalty.

Right, this system would run through the entire runlist at several kHz when idle and 0.5-1kHz under load on a PowerPC 405 that ran at about 200MIPS. Our shortest deadline was 10ms so it was plenty fast enough. Context switch was swapping out 12 machine words.