Resource Allocation and Scheduling

Up to this point in the development of our paper operating system we have assumed that all processes have the resources they need. It is now time to consider how processes acquire their resources, and how a limited set of resources can be effectively shared among several processes. Our discussion of resource allocation will also include scheduling since the two functions are closely related: decisions on process priority can be dependent on where resources are committed, and the introduction of new processes into the system is clearly influenced by the amount of spare resource capacity. In fact scheduling, being concerned with the allocation of central processors, can be regarded as a subtopic of resource allocation as a whole.