The design, implementation and evaluation of SMART: A scheduler for multimedia applications

J Nieh, MS Lam - Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on …, 1997 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, 1997dl.acm.org
Real-tune applications such as multimedia audio and video are increasingly populating the
workstation desktop. To support the execution of these applications in conjunction with
traditional non-realtime applications, we have created SMART, a Scheduler for Muhimedia
And Real-'Hme applications. SMART supports applications with time constraints. and
provides dynamic feedback to applications to allow them to adapt to the current load. In
addition. the support for real-lime applications is integrated with the support for conventional …
Abstract
Real-tune applications such as multimedia audio and video are increasingly populating the workstation desktop. To support the execution of these applications in conjunction with traditional non-realtime applications, we have created SMART, a Scheduler for Muhimedia And Real-‘Hme applications. SMART supports applications with time constraints. and provides dynamic feedback to applications to allow them to adapt to the current load. In addition. the support for real-lime applications is integrated with the support for conventional computations. This allows the user to prioritize across real-time and conventional computations, and dictate how the processor is to be shared among applications of the same priority. As the system load changes, SMART adjusts the allocation of resources dynamically and seamlessly. SMART is unique in its ability to automatically shed real-time tasks and regulate their execution rates when the system is overloaded, while providing better value in underloaded conditions than previously proposed schemes. We have implemented SMART in the Solaris UNIX operating system and measured its performance against 0th~ schedulers in executing real-time, interactive, and batch applications. Our results demonstrate SMART% superior performance in supporting multimedia applications.
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