A Resource-Centric Approach To Multimedia Operating Systems
Shuichi Oikawa, Ragunathan Rajkumar · 2000
this paper that multimedia operating systems must provide a rich set of resource-centric primitives and abstractions that enable applications to specify, monitor and control their resource usage and thereby their timing behavior. In addition, multimedia operating systems must support enforced and secure resource usage, time-aware communication protocol processing and high-performance mechanisms for synchronization. The CPU reservation mechanism of RT-Mach [Mercer94] was a first significant step in this direction. However, we have also come to realize that it was also the first step in "learning to walk", and generalizations and extensions to the mechanism are sorely needed to make resource management schemes flexible and easy to use in practice. We have proposed new abstractions such as a resource set, a reserve set and resource usage that act as organizing principles for real-time and multimedia microkernels. Our new concepts of hard, firm and soft reserves as well as the binding scope of reserves offer new insights into how resource reservation in a microkernel should be structured in order to retain conceptual control, maximum flexibility, and efficient implementation of resource allocation and management.