Supporting Continuous Media Applications in a Micro-Kernel Environment

Abstract

Translate Article

Today’s operating systems were not designed 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 the Chorus micro-kernel operating system environment which provides the necessary soft real-time support while simultaneously running conventional applications. Our approach is to extend existing Chorus abstractions to include QoS configurability, connection oriented communications and real-time threads. The paper defines a low level API for distributed real-time programming and describes an implementation which features a close integration of communications and thread scheduling and the use of a split level scheduling architecture with kernel and user level threads.