Monday, February 18 2008 @ 04:58 PM EST Contributed by: sde
One distinction between the genders, allegedly, is the ability to multitask. Now, depending on who you speak to either women possess this or men do but I’m not bold enough to join that debate. What I can tell you, however, is that Linux definitely does. And, in fact, many systems may not be taking full advantage of it. Here’s why.
Back in days of yore, desktop computers did not multitask. They ran one dedicated task at a time. These days are past; even the most modest of embedded operating systems is generally capable of multitasking in some way.
Multitasking isn’t simple to implement for an operating system developer. It’s simple enough to explain – the CPU’s time must be divided between all the different tasks. Yet, there’s a whole heap more to it than this. Some processes are more important than others and must run regularly. Others are less important and can sit idling in the background. And should you let programs decide when to relinquish control back to the operating system for someone else, or should the OS make these decisions giving each task a specified amount of time to run before suspending it?
