• A process is a single thread of execution.

• Preemption is the act of changing the CPU’s execution from one process to another.

• A scheduling policy is a set of rules that determines the process to run.

• Rate-monotonic scheduling (RMS) is a simple, but powerful, scheduling policy.

• Interprocess communication mechanisms allow data to be passed reliably between processes.

• Scheduling analysis often ignores certain real-world effects. Cache interactions between processes are the most important effects to consider when designing a system.