[pitust2]

> Or maybe I'm all wrong. I'm not an OS dev, so please someone correct me.

Nope, you are completl right! A while (true) might slow down the system, but even that is not necessarily the case: I wrote a program to test this (based on the pseudocode in the readme) and my system is totally usable, with basically zero lag! This is the power of a well-written operating system that includes a mysterious concept called priorities. There is actually no discernable different when running the program (other than battery use and temperature going up). In fact, I am running that program as I right this because the difference is so negligable.

program: https://paste.sr.ht/~pitust/47dc80ff09243b4bf41a08ae9434a32c...

> In terms of security, this would make denial of service attacks against such systems trivial

Denial of service attacks where you have access to the target system are not super hard to mount AFAIK.

[JoeAltmaier]

But understand that modern CPUs have hyperthreading, meaning more than one independent thread of execution. A while(true) on one doesn't affect the other(s). So you won't notice much - other apps keep running.

Not because it isn't a resource disaster. But because unless you measure something, you might not notice.

Oh! You did measure something. Battery use and temp. There you go. It's a disaster. Some kind of management of such irresponsible threads is definitely a good idea.

[pitust2]

> But understand that modern CPUs have hyperthreading, meaning more than one independent thread of execution. I know. But spinning up threads in an infinite loop is going to get code running on all threads (and indeed, that can be confirmed on `htop`). Also, not all CPUs have hyperthreading: the apple M1 chip (which is indeed my CPU) does not have support for that.

> Oh! You did measure something. Battery use and temp. So I didn't do any scientific measurements, but the temperature difference doesn't seem to be very significant.

> It's a disaster. But cooperative scheduling isn't any better. In fact, it's even worse! Since if an app doesn't yield (and let's face it, no app is perfect), you can easily get a deadlock. Developing for such a system without a VM sounds like a nightmare too to be honest.

> Some kind of management of such irresponsible threads is definitely a good idea. What kind of managment do you propose? I mean, if there is nothing else running on the system, it's probably okay to just let them keep running (it's not like they are harming anything except battery life, and you might want something that can max all cpu cores, like if you are running a compilation or a video game).