[toast0]

Registers are expensive, yeah, but pushing them onto the stack isn't the most expensive part of a context switch on a modern cpu anyway. Switching the page table, and blowing away the TLB is. Pushing all the registers is some nice sequential memory activity and the stack area is frequently accessed and unlikely to have contention, so it's easy to cache (other than one or the other of push or pop has to go backwards, so you better have predictive access in both directions)