Chapter 7. Process Scheduling
Like every time sharing system, Linux achieves the magical effect of an apparent simultaneous execution of multiple processes by switching from one process to another in a very short time frame. Process switching itself was discussed in Chapter 3; this chapter deals with scheduling , which is concerned with when to switch and which process to choose.
The chapter consists of three parts. The section "Scheduling Policy" introduces the choices made by Linux in the abstract to schedule processes. The section "The Scheduling Algorithm" discusses the data structures used to implement scheduling and the corresponding algorithm. Finally, the section "System Calls Related to Scheduling" describes the system calls that affect process scheduling.
To simplify the description, we refer as usual to the 80 × 86 architecture; in particular, we assume that the system uses the Uniform Memory Access model, and that the system tick is set to 1 ms.
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