[frant-hartm]

This is called mounting/un-mounting and is much cheaper than a context switch.

[immibis]

This is a type of context switch. You are saying dollars are cheaper than money.

[peeters]

It's been a really long time since I dealt with anything this low level, but in my very limited and ancient experience when people talk about context switching they're talking specifically about the userland process yielding execution back to the kernel so that the processor can be reassigned to a different process/thread. Naively, if the JVM isn't actually yielding control back to the kernel, it has the freedom to do things in a much more lightweight manner than the kernel would have to.

So I think it's meaningful to define what we mean by context switch here.