A flexible real-time scheduling abstraction: Design and implementation

An evolution is happening in the way that operating systems support the real-time requirements of their applications. The need to run real-time applications such as multimedia in the same environment as complex non-real-time servers and applications has motivated much interest in restructuring existing operating systems. Many issues related to thread scheduling and synchronization have been investigated. However, little consideration has been given to the flexibility and modularity required in the support of application-level scheduling needs, although it is well known that application requirements are diverse. In this paper, we describe a real-time scheduling abstraction which provides modularity and flexibility to the scheduling support of operating systems. Our design has been implemented using the Mach 3.0 kernel and a locally developed multiprocessor kernel (the r-kernel) as development platforms. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.