Note: this article was written by Daniel Reinhold who unfortunately left the Haiku project and thus doesn't have his own website account.
The OS scheduler is the heart (nearly literally) of any operating system, so it's got to be in good working order. It needs to be fast, efficient, and distribute the computer's resources fairly. But what does that really mean? What makes a good scheduler?
In order to better understand this critical component, I recently wrote a userland prototype that mimics a real scheduler. This is taking advantage of the 'friendly third option' in kernel development. That is, when you want to test (and/or otherwise examine) a piece of kernel level code, you either:
