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Mach Scheduling and Thread Interfaces

Mac OS X is based on Mach and BSD. Like Mach and most BSD UNIX systems, it contains an advanced scheduler based on the CMU Mach 3 scheduler. This chapter describes the scheduler from the perspective of both a kernel programmer and an application developer attempting to set scheduling parameters.

This chapter begins with the “Overview of Scheduling”, which describes the basic concepts behind Mach scheduling at a high level, including real-time priority support.

The second section, “Using Mach Scheduling From User Applications”, describes how to access certain key Mach scheduler routines from user applications and from other parts of the kernel outside the scheduler.

The third section, “Kernel Thread APIs”, explains scheduler-related topics including how to create and terminate kernel threads and describes the BSD spl macros and their limited usefulness in Mac OS X.

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