Abstract
Applications that manipulate digital audio and video are rapidly being added to workstations. Such computations can often consume the resources of an entire machine. By incorporating a “realtime” process scheduler, UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), the most common basis of workstation operating systems, claims to provide system support for multimedia applications. Our quantitative measurements of real application performance demonstrate that this process scheduler is largely ineffective and can even produce system lockup. While SVR4 UNIX provides many controls for changing scheduler performance, they are virtually impossible to use successfully. Furthermore, the existence of a realtime static priority process scheduler in no way allows a user to deal with these problems.This paper provides a quantitative analysis of real system behavior, demonstrates why it is not possible to obtain the kind of behavior desired with the mechanisms currently provided by the system, and presents modifications to improve the situation.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Nieh, J., Hanko, J.G., Northcutt, J.D., Wall, G.A. (1994). SVR4UNIX scheduler unacceptable for multimedia applications. In: Shepherd, D., Blair, G., Coulson, G., Davies, N., Garcia, F. (eds) Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video. NOSSDAV 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 846. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58404-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58404-8_5
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