Developing a Complete Integrated Real-Time System

Modern systems are frequently called upon to support mixes of applications with different types of timeliness requirements. Current solutions for supporting such mixes are ad hoc and do not guarantee the requirements of all types of processes. We discuss the need for better systems support for such mixes and present partial solutions toward the development of such systems. These include an integrated real-time scheduler that focuses on best-effort performance, a slack scheduler designed to improve the performance of soft real-time processes, and an integrated soft real-time disk bandwidth manager.