Computers as Components, 3rd Edition

6.5 Priority-Based Scheduling

The operating system’s fundamental job is to allocate resources in the computing system among programs that request them. Naturally, the CPU is the scarcest resource, so scheduling the CPU is the operating system’s most important job. In this section, we consider the structure of operating systems, how they schedule processes to meet performance requirements, and how they provide services beyond CPU scheduling.

Round-robin scheduling

A common scheduling algorithm in general-purpose operating systems is round-robin. All the processes are kept on a list and scheduled one after the other. This is generally combined with preemption so that one process does not grab all the CPU time. Round-robin scheduling provides ...