Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 07/1994 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Computer Networks and ISDN Systems |
Issue number | 10 |
Volume | 26 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Pages (from-to) | 1323-1341 |
Publication Status | Published |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
Currently, popular operating systems are unable to support the end-to-end real-time requirements of distributed continuous media. Furthermore, the integration of continuous media communications software into such systems poses significant challenges. This paper describes a design for distributed multimedia support in a micro-kernel operating system environment which provides the necessary soft real-time support while simultaneously running conventional applications. Our approach is to extend existing micro-kernel abstractions to include QoS configurability, connection-oriented communications and real-time threads. The design uses the following key concepts: the notion of a flow to represent QoS controlled communication between two application threads, a close integration of communications and thread scheduling and the use of a split-level scheduling architecture with kernel-and user-level threads. Implementation work is not yet completed and therefore performance figures are not available. However, the paper shows how our design qualitatively improves performance over existing micro-kernel facilities by reducing the number of protection-domain crossings and context switches incurred.