and return the execution back to the userspace. Additional code can be added into kernel space through the use of loadable kernel modules, but only by a user with the requisite permissions, as this code is not subject to the access control and safety limitations of user mode. DOS (for as long as no 386 memory manager such as EMM386 is loaded), as well as other simple operating systems and many embedded devices run in supervisor mode permanently, meaning that drivers can be written directly as user programs. Most processors have at least two different modes. The x86-processors have four different modes divided into four different rings. Programs that run in Ring 0 can do anything with the system, and code that runs in Ring 3 should be able to fail at any time without impact to the rest of the computer system. Ring 1 and Ring 2 are rarely used, but could be configured with different levels of access. In most existing systems, switching from user mode to kernel mode has an associated high cost in performance. It has been measured, on the basic request getpid, to cost 1000–1500 cycles on most machines. Of these just around 100 are for the actual switch (70 from user to kernel space, and 40 back), the rest is "kernel overhead". In the L3 microkernel, the minimization of this overhead reduced the overall cost to around 150 cycles. Maurice Wilkes wrote: ... it eventually became clear that the hierarchical protection that rings provided did not closely match the requirements of the system programmer and gave little or no improvement on the simple system of having two modes only. Rings of protection lent themselves to efficient implementation in hardware, but there was little else to be said for them. [...] The attractiveness of fine-grained protection remained, even after it was seen that rings of protection did not provide the answer... This again proved a blind alley... To gain performance and determinism, some systems place functions that would likely be viewed as application logic, rather than as device drivers, in kernel mode; security applications (access control, firewalls, etc.) and operating system monitors are cited as examples. At least one embedded database management system, eXtremeDB Kernel Mode, has been developed specifically for kernel mode deployment, to provide a local database for kernel-based application functions, and to eliminate the context switches that would otherwise occur when kernel