A Hierarchical CPU Scheduler for Multimedia Operating Systems

The need for supportingvarietyof hard and soft real-time, as well as best effort applications ina multimedia computing environment requires an operating system framework that: (1) enables different schedulers to be employed for different application classes, and (2) provides protection betweenthevariousclassesofapplications. Wearguethat these objectives can be achieved by hierarchical partitioning of CPU bandwidth, in which an operating system partitions the CPU bandwidth among various application classes, and each application class, in turn, partitions its allocation (potentially using a different scheduling algorithm) among its sub-classes or applications. We present Start-time Fair Queuing (SFQ) algorithm, which enables such hierarchical partitioning. We have implemented a hierarchical scheduler in Solaris 2.4. We describe our implementation, and demonstrate its suitability for multimedia operating systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Pawan Goyal, Xingang Guo, Harrick M. Vin
• Keywords: Application Classes, CPU Bandwidth, Hierarchical Partitioning, Operating System, OSDI 1996