Interesting. I will have to look up to see if there are any equivalents on the OPs on dual-core, windows xp system.

There are the 6 levels of processes priority which are analogous to the three described in sched_setScheduler, but they are further influenced Dynamic Priority Boosts. And that is further influenced by whether the system is configured as a workstation or server. And if it's a workstation then it's influenced once more by whether the workstation has Foreground Priority Boost enabled.

I also think I remember reading about the NT scheduler tending to have a 'natural affinity' to keeping a cpu-bound process (or maybe thread, but same thing in a single threaded application) running on the same cpu or core, but I can't lay my hands on a reference for that just now.