CPU resource management for the java platform
Date
1999
Authors
Pang, James Chun
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Abstract
It has been well observed in the literature that multimedia applications are soft real-time. Real-time programming, whether hard or soft, is about resource management. An integrated multimedia system must possess capabilities to allocate and police the usage of system resources such as CPU bandwidth so that certain Quality of Service (QoS) parameters can be expressed and guaranteed. Studies of CPU scheduling and bandwidth management abound. However, current-generation, commercially available general purpose computing platforms such as Java still lack the necessary facilities to support QoS guarantees for soft real-time tasks. To remedy this lack, we developed a new thread model for Java that enables CPU resource management, and a system architecture that supports a service fraction-based thread scheduler in the Java multi-threading framework. We have implemented this model and system architecture in a new Java virtual machine, named QNM, based on the reference implementation from Sun Microsystems. Our analysis of this implementation is also presented. Our test results show that QNM is able to provide CPU resource management and QoS guarantees for soft real-time tasks.