...how windows 95 (and up) handle pre-emptive multitasking? I have been searching the net for a couple of hours now and all I can find are definitions. I know what pre-emptive multitasking is, I just want to know how win95 does it.
I was thinking that maybe MS reprogrammed channel 0 of the PIT chip and remapped INT 8 to another interupt number and put in their task-switching code into that interupt and set the PIT chip's channel 0 to a really high timer rate and called the remapped INT 8 only 8.2 times per second or something but that doesn't seem right...so if not the PIT chip, how could they do it? I know Win3.x & MACOS use coopertive multitasking but that sux and I want to know how preempting is done on an x86. Is there anything that will automatically trigger an interupt thousends of times per second other then the software? Can the mouse/keyboard triger hardware interupts?
Thanks,
Robert Lee