What is Dispatcher?

->Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler; this involves:Switching contextSwitching to user modeJumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program Dispatch latency � time it takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running.

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pbchaudhari
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Aug 15th, 2007

The short-term scheduler (also known as the dispatcher) decides which of the ready, in memory processes are to be executed (allocated a CPU) next, following a clock interrupt, an IO interrupt, an operating system call or another form of signal. Thus the short-term scheduler makes scheduling decisions much more frequently than the long-term or mid-term schedulers - a scheduling decision will at a minimum have to be made after every time slice, and these are very short. This scheduler can be preemptive, implying that it is capable of forcibly removing processes from a CPU when it decides to allocate that CPU to another process, or non-preemptive, in which case the scheduler is unable to "force" processes off the CPU.