erik malund wrote:
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Real time while multitasking is the OS developers idea of "real enough".



...but thats always the way. Real time is when its fast enough. Standard guiding principle in system design. Isn't it. Try CMX or something like that for better real time performance.

Though I am loath to defend Windows, in NT /2K (not originally MS design remember - it was done by Dave Cutler, the man who wrote VMS) it is a very fair stab at a preemptive multi-tasking, protected mode OS, where it is very diffcult to crash the whole OS. That said in NT4 and 2K the reliabilty suffered when the GUI was integrated into the OS to speed things up.
No proper OS (Even Linux) will allow direct access to its ports and registers except by devious programming, though admittedly the API in Linux is much more clearly defined and easy to work with.