Windows® CE 3.0 Application Programming

Thread Priorities

The previous section described how threads are scheduled for execution using the quantum time period. The thread scheduler uses a round-robin algorithm for scheduling threads. However, this ignores the fact that threads can have different priorities, and this affects how frequently a thread is scheduled.

In Windows CE 3.0 a thread can be assigned any one of 255 different priorities, with 0 being the highest priority and 255 the lowest. The seven lowest priorities (255 to 249) are application thread priorities, while the remainder are real-time priorities. In Windows NT/98/2000 a thread has a priority relative to the process's priority class. Windows CE does not use priority classes, and each thread has a priority in its own ...