A journey into the Linux scheduler
Two years ago more or less I started my journey in Linux. I was scared at first and I didn’t know where to start from. But then I decided to buy a book - and what a book! - in order to follow a path.
Along the way, I integrated the material with up-to-date documentation from kernel.org and source code. In the meantime, I started to learn C a bit so that I also could have played with what I was learning, step by step.
One of the things I was fascinated by was how Linux is able to manage and let the CPU run thousands and thousands of processes each second. To give you an idea, right now, Linux on my laptop configured with an Intel i7-1185G7 CPU switched context 28,428 times in a second! That’s fantastic, isn’t it?
During this journey inside Linux, I’ve written notes as it helps me to digest and re-process in my own way the informations I learn. Then I thought: “Maybe they’re useful to someone. Why not share them?”.
In order to do it, imagine what we would expect from an operating system. Let’s say that we’d want it to run tasks that we need to complete, providing the OS hardware resources. Tasks come of different natures but we can simply categorize them as CPU-intensive and interactive ones.
