Multimedia on Multiprocessors: Where’s the OS When You Really Need It?

Due to the limitations of current operating systems in supporting multimedia applications, much work has been done to provide resource management mechanisms to address this problem. As processor cycles are often the most oversubscribed and critical resource, most of this work has focused on uniprocessor scheduling. However, hardware platforms are moving to multiprocessor systems, and little work has been done to address the problem of supporting multimedia applications in a multiprocessor context. This paper proposes a new multiprocessor scheduler designed to meet the requirements of multimedia applications. We present an overview of the scheduling algorithm, describe its implementation in a commercial operating system, and discuss directions for future work.