The Design and Implementation of an Operating System to Support Distributed Multimedia Applications

Support for multimedia applications by general purpose computing platforms has been the subject of considerable research. Much of this work is based on an evolutionary strat­ egy in which small changes to existing systems are made. The approach adopted here is to start ab initio with no backward compatibility constraints. This leads to a novel structure for an operating system. The structure aims to decouple applications from one another and to pruvide multiplexing of all resources, not just the CPU, at a low level. The mutivation for this structure, a desigu based on the structure, and its implementation on a number of hardware platforms is described.