The /reserv file system resembles many Plan 9 [19] APIs, which also use special file systems. We used Plan 9 in our previous MTR-LS work [6] but decided to replace it by FreeBSD because of FreeBSD's greater popularity and support for more current hardware.
Stride scheduling and the associated currency abstraction [24] can be used to group and isolate users, processes, or threads, much like the resource reservations discussed here. Another alternative is resource containers [1], which can isolate resources used by each client, whether within a single process or across multiple processes. Resource containers have been demonstrated primarily for priority-based CPU scheduling, not for hierarchical proportional sharing of different resources, as we advocate here. Our solutions for retrofitting reservations into a time-sharing system (e.g., how to associate reservations with references to shared objects, tag requests, and garbage collect reservations) may be useful also in conjunction with those frameworks.
Nemesis [14] is an operating system that uses a radical new architecture in order to eliminate QoS crosstalk, i.e., the degradation of one application's performance due to the load on another application. The Nemesis kernel provides only scheduling, and most other operating system services are implemented as libraries that are linked with applications and run in each application's address space. Eclipse/BSD attempts to provide similar isolation in a conventional monolithic architecture, requiring comparatively much less implementation effort.
SMART [17] is a hierarchical CPU scheduling algorithm that supports both hard real-time and conventional time-sharing applications, adjusts well to overload, and can notify applications when their deadlines cannot be met. Rialto [13] combines CPU reservations and time constraints into a scheduling graph that is used by a run-time scheduler to provide strong CPU guarantees. While SMART and Rialto target especially hard real-time CPU scheduling, the work presented here addresses mostly soft real-time scheduling of different resources and the integration of such scheduling into conventional systems.