Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities

Application performance is directly affected by the hardware resources required, the degree to which such resources are available, and how the operating system addresses the requirements with regard to the other processes in the system. Ideally, an application would have access to all the resources it could use and be allowed to complete its work without competing with any other activity in the system. In a world of highly shared hardware resources and general-purpose, timeshare-based operating systems, however, no guarantees can be made as to how well resourced an application will be. © 2012 ACM.