The Scheduler (opens in new tab)

In the previous article we looked at how the kernel gives every process its own private view of memory. But memory is only half of what a process needs to actually run. The other half is the CPU itself — and there are only so many CPUs in a machine, while there are usually hundreds or thousands of things that want to run on them. So somebody has to decide, constantly, who gets a CPU and for how long. That somebody is the scheduler. Every few milliseconds, on every core, the kernel asks itself...