2001 FREENIX Track Technical Program - Abstract
Predictable Management of System Resources for Linux
Mansoor Alicherry and K. Gopinath, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
Abstract
In current operating systems, a process acts both as a
protection domain and as a resource principal. This
may not be the right model as a user may like to see a set of processes or a
sub activity in a process as a resource principal. Another problem is that
much of the processing may happen in the interrupt context, and they will
not be accounted for properly. Resource Containers have been
introduced to solve such problems in the large-scale server systems context
by separating out the protection domain
from the resource principal by associating and charging all the processing to
the correct container. This paper tries to investigate how this model
fits into a Linux framework, especially, in the soft real time context.
We show that this model allows us to allocate resources in a predictable manner
and hence can be used for scheduling soft real-time tasks like multimedia.
We also provide a framework in Linux which allows
privileged users to have their own schedulers for scheduling a group of
activities so that they can make use of the domain knowledge about the
applications. We also extend this model to allow multiple scheduling classes.
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