hi all,
the following paragraph is from "LINUX KERNEL DEVELOPMENT" by Robert Love.
I/O-Bound Versus Processor-Bound Processes
Processes can be classified as either I/O-bound or processor-bound. The former is characterized as a process that spends
much of its time submitting and waiting on I/O requests. Consequently, such a process is often runnable, but only for
short periods, because it will eventually block waiting on more I/O (this is any type of I/O, such as keyboard activity,
and not just disk I/O). Conversely, processor-bound processes spend much of their time executing code. They tend to run
until they are preempted because they do not block on I/O requests very often. Because they are not I/O-driven, however,
system response does not dictate that the scheduler run them often. The scheduler policy for processor-bound processes,
therefore, tends to run such processes less frequently but for longer periods. Of course, these classifications are not
mutually exclusive. The scheduler policy in Unix variants tends to explicitly favor I/O-bound processes.
i couldnt understand how does the scheduler categorize a process into whether it is an
I/O - bound process
or
non - I/O bound process
if it ever does in practice ?
and thus favor I/O bound processes ?
cheers,
Amith
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