Processor Affinity in Symmetric Multiprocessing
Processor Affinity refers to a process's tendency to continue running on the processor on which it is currently running. When a process executes on a CPU, that process's cache is populated with its most recently accessed data, if a process is moved to a different CPU, that second processor's cache must be populated with that data. More ...
First-Come, First-Served CPU Scheduling Algorithm
CPU Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the processes in the ready queue is to be alocated the CPU. There are many different CPU scheduling algorithms. In this article we describe first-come, first-served scheduling. More ...
Virtual Memory and Memory Paging
In the early days of computers, memory chips were small capacity, scarce, and expensive. Because of this a memory management scheme called paging was invented. More ...
Direct Memory Access (DMA)
In early computers, all data transfers required the processor to read and write single words from memory until the entire transfer is complete. With DMA, the DMA controller takes control of the system buses to move data between the device and main memory. More ...
AMD's Phenom Processor
Since 2005 AMD has used the Athlon name for their processors. This changed in 2007 when they released their new processor called Phenom. So we must ask the question; what is the difference between the Athlon and the Phenom? More ...
Change Raspberry Pi Default Configuration
If you are a US user of the Raspberry Pi, you will discover that when you type, the characters displayed do not match our keyboard. When you type [shift][#] instead you get the British pound symbol. This is because Raspbian (and NOOBS) defaults to UK keyboard settings. More ...
Round-Robin CPU Scheduling Algorithm
CPU Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the processes in the ready queue is to be alocated the CPU. There are many different CPU scheduling algorithms. In this article we describe round-robin CPU scheduling. More ...
Digital Logic Transfer Characteristics
In the real world, gates don't transfer logic levels instantaneously. The time it takes for electrons and holes to move through the semiconductor material (called propagation delay) in CMOS are less than 100 ps (pico seconds), but there are other delays caused by resistance, capacitance, and inductance. More ...
Microcontroller Internal EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) Memory
In some situations it is required that some program parameters such as configuration settings be keept after the system is powered off. This is made possible by including a EEPROM internally to the microcontroller. More ...
Priority CPU Scheduling Algorithm
CPU Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the processes in the ready queue is to be alocated the CPU. There are many different CPU scheduling algorithms. In this article we describe priority CPU scheduling. More ...
Microprocessor Registers
To a large extent the operation of a microprocessor involves loading, transferring, and manipulating the contents of registers. In this article you learn about the functions, and purposes of the register set of the Intel 8086 microprocessor. More ...
Load Balancing Multiple CPUs in Symmetric Multiprocessing
On Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems it is important to keep the workload balanced among all processors. There are two approaches to accomplish this, push migration and pull migration. More ...