Preemptive scheduling

[bob]

You see preemptive scheduling lets the processor yank control away from one task and hand it to another without waiting for it to finish. I recall how this keeps everything responsive on busy systems. But you might wonder about the costs involved with all those switches happening constantly. And the kernel decides based on timers or priorities to interrupt running code. Or perhaps the hardware signals force an immediate change in execution flow.
This approach gives better fairness when multiple jobs compete for cpu time. I often explain to you that a running process gets halted mid way so others can proceed without delay. But context saving takes effort and drains some performance away. Also the scheduler checks conditions frequently to pick the next candidate. Maybe starvation happens if high priority tasks keep arriving and block lower ones. Then you notice response times improve for interactive work because no single process hogs resources forever.
Priority levels guide decisions yet preemption allows dynamic adjustments during execution. I think you grasp how time slices prevent long jobs from dominating everything around them. But overhead builds up from frequent state preservations and restores in memory. Or the system might favor short jobs to finish quick and free space. Also algorithms like shortest remaining time adjust on the fly when new arrivals appear. You benefit from smoother multitasking feel even on older hardware setups.
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