Solaris™ Internals: Core Kernel Components

9.1. Overview

The Solaris kernel scheduler provides a rich set of features and innovations that contribute significantly to the speed and scalability of the operating system. The Solaris kernel is preemptive; that is, the execution of an operating system kernel thread, or user thread, can be preempted if a higher priority thread becomes runnable. This feature minimizes dispatch latency and is a key component to the implementation of the real-time scheduling class. The preemption mechanism is applied across the entire range of system priorities. In general, if a thread of a higher (better) priority than all threads currently executing becomes runnable, a preemption will occur, forcing the executing thread to relinquish the processor so the higher ...