Like David, I do not like the idea of pre-empting kernel tasks. It implies a
more complex locking setup than I'd really like.
HOWEVER, I'm all for having "user processes" in kernel mode. That's not too
hard - if only implies that we have to change the way we test for "user vs
kernel" a bit.
Right now, the way the kernel "return to user mode" stuff checks for user
mode is to look at the saved x86 CS segment register, and looking if the
protection level of the code segment we return to is non-zero (ie user).
That actually means we also have to check the eflags register to see whether
it's a vm86 return (because if it is, then we can't look at the CS register).
However, it would not be very hard at all to instead of checking that kind of
hardware thing we'd check a software flag instead (it essentially just
involves having a per-process "kernel entry" counter, and checking for zero).
And then we could make a kernel thread pre-emptable by just changing the
software flag to "user mode" for that thread - voila, instant "user mode
behavior" together with all the kernel services..
(such a process would obviously have to be careful about not doing anything
that causes re-entrancy problems, but that kind of kernel thread would be
most useful for a very simple kind of loop anyway, so that's not really a
problem - just don't do anything stupid).
Linus