0(1) Scheduler

One of the responsibilities of the kernel is to make sure that each execution thread gets a reasonable amount of time on the CPU(s). The scheduling algorithm used in the Linux 2.4 kernel gradually decreased performance as more processes were added and additional CPUs were brought online, making it hard to use Linux on large SMP systems. The 2.6 scheduling algorithm runs in O(1) time, a term that indicates that a process takes the same time to run under all conditions, making Linux better able to run large numbers of processes and scale to large systems.