Emulating soft real-time scheduling using traditional operating system schedulers

Abstract

Real-time scheduling algorithms are usually only available in the kernels of real-time operating systems, and not in more general purpose operating systems, like Unix. For some soft real-time problems, a traditional operating system may be the development platform of choice. This paper addresses methods of emulating real-time scheduling algorithms on top of standard time-share schedulers. We examine (through simulations) three strategies for priority assignment within a traditional multi-tasking environment. The results show that the emulation algorithms are comparable in performance to the real-time algorithms and in some instances outperform them.<>