What are different types of schedulers and their workings?

Scheduling is an important part of the working of operating systems. 

- The scheduler is the component that provides access to the resources to the processes, threads and data flows. 

- These resources may include time of the processor and the communications bandwidth. 

- Scheduling is necessary for effectively balancing the load of the system and achieving the target of QoS or quality of service. 

- Scheduling is also necessary for the systems that do multitasking and multiplexing on a single processor since they need to divide the CPU time between many processes. 

- In multiplexing, it is required for timing the simultaneous transmission of the multiple flows.

Important things about Scheduler

There are 3 things which most concern the scheduler:

1. Throughput
2. Latency inclusive of the response time and the turnaround time
3. Waiting time or the fairness time

- But when practically implemented, conflicts arise between these goals for example between latency and throughput. 

- It is the scheduler that can make a compromise between any two goals. 

- Based on the user’s requirements and the objectives it is decided to which goal the preference has to be given. 

- In systems such as the embedded systems and robotics that operate in real time environment, it has to be ensured by the scheduler that the processes are capable of meeting the deadlines. 

- This is a very critical factor in maintaining the stability of the system. 

- The administrative back end is used for managing the scheduled tasks that are then sent to the mobile devices.  

Types of Schedulers

There are 3 different types of schedulers available which we discuss below:

Long term Schedulers or Admission Schedulers: 

- The purpose of this type of scheduler is to decide about the processes and jobs to be admitted or added to the ready queue. 

- When a program makes an attempt for executing a process, it is the responsibility of the long – term scheduler to delay or authorize the request for admitting the process to the ready queue. 

- Thus, what all processes will be executed by the system is dictated by this scheduler. 

- It also dictates about the degree of the concurrency and handling of the CPU intensive and I/O intensive processes. 

- Modern operating systems use this for making sure that there is enough time for the processes to finish of their tasks. 

- Modern GUIs would be of very less use if there was no real time scheduling. 

- The long term queue resides in the secondary memory.

Medium term Schedulers: 

- This scheduler serves the purpose of removing the processes from the physical memory and placing them in the virtual memory and even vice versa. 

- This process is called swapping out and swapping in. 

- A process that has been inactive for some time might be swapped by the scheduler. 

- It may also swap a process with frequent page faulting, low priority or more amount of memory etc. 

- This is necessary since this makes the space available for other processes.

Short term Schedulers: 

- These schedulers are more commonly known as the CPU schedulers.

- It decides which one out of all the processes will be executed after the clock interrupt, a system call, an I/O interrupt, hardware interrupt and so on. 

- Thus, we can say that the frequency of the short term schedulers of making decisions is much higher than that of the long term and medium term schedulers since after every time slice these schedulers have to decide.

- There is one more component that is involved in CPU scheduling but is not counted under schedulers. It is called dispatcher.