Posts tagged kernel
The Democratic Kernel Scheduler
- 15 June 2021
One of the hardest classes in BYU’s computer science program is CS 345: Operating Systems Design. When I took the class last Fall, I learned how difficult kernel development is and how complex the puzzles of operating system internals are. One of the most famous of these puzzles is that of the scheduler. Before taking the class, I had a few years of experience with High Performance Computing schedulers such as Slurm and PBS Pro. This type of scheduling software is different from that of an operating system, but helped me realize that this was a highly important and difficult puzzle to solve.
CS 345 involves a set of projects of varying difficulty. A scaffolding OS is provided, and a feature of the OS is implemented in each project. Two of the seven projects (#2 and #5) are to implement different types of schedulers: first a prioritized round-robin queue, then later a fair-share system. I enjoyed these two projects more than any others in the class, which left me with a quest to create a unique scheduling algorithm. Hence, the Democratic Kernel Scheduler (DKS)