Comment by zozbot123

> ... the darwin kernel has a keen awareness of what threads directly affect the user interface and which do not (even including the handling of XPC calls across process boundaries... if your work drives the UI, you get scheduling/RAM priority). I don't think the linux kernel has nearly this level of awareness.

You're talking about priority inheritance in the kernel. In Linux, this is in development as part of the PREEMPT_RT ("real-time") patches, already available experimentally in a number of distributions.