SMART UNIX SVR4 support for multimedia applications

Abstract

Multimedia applications have dynamic and adaptive real-time requirements. Current scheduling practice, as typified by UNIX System V Release 4, lacks the necessary information and interfaces to meet these requirements. To address this problem, we have created the SMART (Scheduler for Multimedia And Real-Time) interface. It explicitly accounts for application-specific time constraints and provides dynamic feedback from the scheduler to applications to allow them to adapt to the system loading condition. This paper describes the design of the interface and its implementation in the Solaris UNIX operating system to provide an effective SVR4-conformant full featured environment for supporting multimedia applications.