Preemptive Scheduling

Definitions

1. A CPU scheduling strategy in which the operating system can forcibly interrupt a running process or thread — typically via a timer interrupt — to allocate the processor to a higher-priority or waiting task, ensuring no single process monopolizes the CPU.

   In plain English: A system where the computer can pause a running program at any moment to give another program a turn, so nothing hogs all the resources.

   Example: "Linux uses preemptive scheduling so a runaway while-loop can't starve every other process on the box."

Related Terms

• Fiber
• Task
• Work Stealing
• IPC
• Multi-Threading
• OS Thread
• Process Group
• Scheduler
• Shared Memory
• Spawning
• Time Slice