Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By : CH Raghav Maruthi
Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By: CH Raghav Maruthi

Overview of this book

Mastering Linux Kernel Development looks at the Linux kernel, its internal arrangement and design, and various core subsystems, helping you to gain significant understanding of this open source marvel. You will look at how the Linux kernel, which possesses a kind of collective intelligence thanks to its scores of contributors, remains so elegant owing to its great design. This book also looks at all the key kernel code, core data structures, functions, and macros, giving you a comprehensive foundation of the implementation details of the kernel’s core services and mechanisms. You will also look at the Linux kernel as well-designed software, which gives us insights into software design in general that are easily scalable yet fundamentally strong and safe. By the end of this book, you will have considerable understanding of and appreciation for the Linux kernel.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Process schedulers


The effectiveness of any operating system is proportional to its ability to fairly schedule all contending processes. The process scheduler is the core component of the kernel, which computes and decides when and for how long a process gets CPU time. Ideally, processes require a timeslice of the CPU to run, so schedulers essentially need to allocate slices of processor time fairly among processes.

A scheduler typically has to:

  • Avoid process starvation
  • Manage priority scheduling
  • Maximize throughput of all processes
  • Ensure low turnaround time
  • Ensure even resource usage
  • Avoid CPU hogging
  • Consider process' behavioral patterns for prioritization
  • Elegantly subsidize under heavy load
  • Handle scheduling on multiple cores efficiently