Operating System Techniques for Distributed Multimedia

In designing operating system support for distributed multimedia, we target three areas for improvement: reduced copying, reduced reliance on explicit kernel-user interactions , and provision of rate-based ow control. Towards these goals, we propose an architecture that includes the concept of I/O eecient buuers for reduced copying, the concept of fast system calls for low latency network access, and the concept of kernel threads for ow control. Also included is a concept called direct media streaming which is suitable for applications that require limited user processing of media data. These concepts have been implemented as an extension to SunOS 5.3 (the operating system component of Solaris 2.3). We report some experimental results on the performance of our current system.