Improving Support for Multimedia System Experimentation and Deployment

Abstract. New applications with increasingly complex complex require-ments present signicant challenges to existing operating systems, mo-tivating the design and implementation of new system abilities. Multi-media applications are excellent driving problems because they exhibit stringent temporal constraints and non-trivial interactions among appli-cations within and across machine boundaries. This paper describes work done under several projects conducted by the author in the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center at the University of Kansas which had the need for real-time software in common. This common set of requirements motivated the development of real-time extensions to Linux capable of scheduling events with microsecond accuracy, and the creation of a facility called the Data Stream Kernel Interface capable of gathering performance data with sub-microsecond precision. This paper provides an overview of these new system abilities, how we have used them, and discusses their relevance to the design, implementation, and evaluation of multimedia systems.