Support for digital audio and video (continuous media) as part of the human/computer interface is an important direction for computer systems research. There are various ways to incorporate continuous media (CM) in computer systems; in the integrated approach, CM data is handled by user-level programs on general-purpose operating systems such as Unix or Mach.
Integrated CM applications handle data at high rates, with strict timing requirements and often in small "chunks". Conventional operating systems support for program execution and local communication may be non-optimal for such applications. In particular, conventional mechanisms for process scheduling and inter address space communication can add significant overhead for some CM programs. User/kernel interactions, by which user-level programs invoke system functions, are partly responsible for this overhead.
We describe new mechanisms for process scheduling and CM stream communication between virtual address spaces. These mechanisms, split-level scheduling and memory-mapped streams, reduce or eliminate user/kernel interactions by using user/kernel shared memory for exchanging scheduling and communication information. We demonstrate that, compared with conventional mechanisms for process scheduling and stream communication, these new mechanisms can reduce overhead by up to a factor of four.
Title
Operating Systems Mechanisms For Continuous Media
Published
Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, July 1992
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
CSD-92-697
Type
Text
Extent
73 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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