Process Scheduling

A small OpenVMS system may have only a few processes and a single CPU, whereas a large system may have multiple CPUs and thousands of processes. OpenVMS must keep track of which process is currently executing on a given CPU, decide when to remove it from execution, and select the next process to execute.

This section describes how OpenVMS manages the scheduling of processes. We start by examining the various process scheduling states and then move on to the dynamics of scheduling.