Scheduling

The second big topic I want to cover in this chapter is scheduling. The Linux scheduler has a queue of threads that are ready to run and its job is to schedule them on CPUs as they become available. Each thread has a scheduling policy which may be timeshared or real-time. The timeshared threads have a niceness value which increases or reduces their entitlement to CPU time. The real-time threads have a priority such that a higher priority thread will preempt a lower one. The scheduler works with threads, not processes. Each thread is scheduled regardless of which process it is running in.

The scheduler runs when:

  • A thread blocks by calling sleep() or in a blocking I/O call
  • A timeshare thread exhausts its time slice
  • An interrupt causes a ...

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