Predictable Management of System Resources for Linux

In current operating systems, a process acts both as a protection domain and as a resource principal. This may not be the right model as a user may like to see a set of processes or a sub-activity in a process as a resource principal. Another problem is that much of the processing may happen in the interrupt context, and will not be accounted for properly. Resource Containers have been introduced to solve such problems in the large-scale server systems context by separating out the protection domain from the resource principal by associating and charging all the processing to the correct container. This paper tries to investigate how this model fits into a Linux framework, especially in the soft real-time context. We show that this model allows us to allocate resources in a predictable manner and hence can be used for scheduling soft real-time tasks like multimedia. We also provide a framework in Linux which allows privileged users to have their own schedulers for scheduling a group of activities so that they can make use of the domain knowledge about the applications. We also extend this model to allow multiple scheduling classes