Understanding NetBSD 2.0's new technology (NewsForge)

[Posted January 5, 2005 by corbet]

NewsForge talks with the NetBSD hackers about new features in the 2.0 release. "Scheduler activations are a mechanism invented by Thomas Anderson in a 1992 paper, which provides an interface between an operating system kernel and an application for maintaining a desired level of concurrency. In this system, the application informs the kernel how much concurrency it has, e.g. how many simultaneously computing threads it will use, and the kernel maintains a certain number of 'activations,' or scheduleable entities, on which the library layers application computation."

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Posted Jan 6, 2005 18:39 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (subscriber, #305) [Link]

I had Tom Anderson as a professor at the University of Washington: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/

I seem to recall that he wished he had chosen a clearer name than "schedule activations" because the name is a continual source of confusion. <:)