PPT Slide
- Dispatcher - name of the part of the operating system that manages the process state finite machine
- Finds a process in the ready queue and starts it running
- If ready queue is empty, it waits for an interrupt to wake it up in the future to see if there’s anything to do then
- Dispatcher - load process state of selected process. Once the ia register is set to the previously-stored value then control resumes in that process (note this is the final thing done by the interrupt handler that called the dispatcher; more than likely the timer interrupt).
- The Dispatcher can be called from many points in the O/S, but it never returns!
- The Dispatcher allocates a time quantum to the selected process (aka time slice)
- In JavaSOS, Dispatcher(), RunProcess(), & SelectProcessToRun() are in SOSProcessManager.java