UNIX Dispatching

UNIX for Beginners Q & A UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers
1

I'm taking a course Intro to operating systems, and I am hung up on what UNIX dispatching is. Can anyone help me answer this question?

Thanks!

2

On hand, this is not a UNIX term I'm familar with. You might try seaching www.google.com and see if anything good pops up. If so, please let us know :slight_smile: Thanks!

3

hi.

i think you mean "patching", not dispatching, that is someone for network-components:)

patching is "to bring your operating system to a new patchlevel" (like installating a servicepack on microsoft). unix is very complex, and you have so much commands and modules. on every software part you have a own developer-team working, and so they fix problems, make the commands/tools/modules saver, better, faster. so it could be that there are some new patches (little peace of software thet removes or changes systemfiles/kernelfiles) every month for your system.

but be aware. dont`t install all patches you can get. always read the "readme-file". your manufacturer have always "recommended patches" to download/send, this is o.k. more patching is required when you find a problem/bug. so you can go to the knowledge database/faq-db of your manufacturer, and normaly he recommends to install a patch that fixes this problem...

best regards,
alex...

4

I don't know what dispatcher do you mean but take a look at:

http://www.maverick.subnet.dk/Mainmenu_NoFrames.html

There you will find:

The Control Processes
A couple of processes are required to make this multitasking miracle happen. They are:

Process Dispatcher
This is the one that determines which queue to fetch the next process from. The process runs in the address space of the currently running task (ie. not its own address space). The Process Dispatcher is run each time the IRQ 0 signal is received.

Scheduler
This is the process which moves processes between the individual suspend queues, the blocked queues and the death row. This process also run in the address space of the currently running task, but this process is called as a result of message passing.

LoadBalancer
This is a process with its own separate address space. The task has an overall view of the load on the system, and even the load on the machines in the neighborhood. The LoadBalancer can open and close the running queues for the extra processors in a multi-processor system, and/or direct load to other machines. Flags in the Process List determines if the process may be distributed.

When distributing processes between host systems, the amount of data to be transferred, may seriously affect the general performance on the system.

HTT