Computers as Components, 2nd Edition

6.4 Interprocess Communication Mechanisms 325

the resource. This ensures that the process will continue executing once it has the

resource so that it can finish its work with the resource, return it to the OS, and

allow other processes to use it. Once the process is finished with the resource, its

priority is demoted to its normal value. Several methods have been developed to

manage the priority swapping process [Liu00].

Rate-monotonic scheduling assumes that there are no data dependencies

between processes. Example 6.6 shows that knowledge of data dependencies can

help use the CPU more efficiently.

Example 6.6

Data dependencies and scheduling

Data dependencies ...