Method and apparatus for efficient scheduling in a multiprocessor system

摘要

In the present invention a predetermined number of bits are added to each entry in the process table. These bits are used to indicate the warmth of the cache with respect to the particular schedulable unit such as a process or thread of a process. The scheduler will then review, not only the priority of the schedulable unit, but the warmth of the cache in order to determine the schedulable unit to be scheduled next with respect to a particular processor. For example, these cache warmth bits may be used to identify the processor the schedulable unit previously executed on such that the scheduler will only schedule the schedulable unit with the processor previously executed on in order to take advantage of the schedulable unit data located in the the cache associated with the processor. The system may be extended to provide more sophisticated models for determining cache warmth and the scheduling of processes and process threads.