MARUTI: a hard real-time operating system

Abstract

The MARUTI operating system is designed to support hard real-time applications on distributed computer systems while providing a fault-tolerant operation. Its design is object oriented, and the communication mechanism allows transparent use of the resources of a distributed system. Fault tolerance is provided through a consistent set of mechanisms that support a number of policies. Most important, MARUTI supports guaranteed-service scheduling, by which jobs that are accepted by the system are guaranteed to meet the time constraints of the computation requests with a specified degree of fault tolerance. As a consequence, MARUTI applications can be executed in a predictable fashion. The development of current hard real-time applications requires that the analyst estimate the resource requirements for all parts of the computation and then makes sure that the resources are available to meet the time constraints, which tends to be a cumbersome process. As a part of the MARUTI system, a set of tools which support the hard real-time applications during various phases of their life cycle has been developed. The present version of MARUTI has been implemented as a prototype running on a Unix platform. Experiences with the development of this prototype are also presented.<>