Recent advances in network technologies, processor capabilities, and microcomputer system hardware, coupled with the explosive growth of the Internet and on-line data access, have created new demands on personal computer operating systems and hardware. In large part, these demands are for the ability to acquire, manipulate, display, and store multimedia data. The computational processes that successfully acquire and display multimedia data necessarily have deadlines. That is, the computation must be complete before a specified point in time. Currently, no general-purpose operating systems support such real-time processes. We have developed a software architecture, called slotted priorities, that defines a way to add support for real-time computation to existing general-purpose operating systems for uniprocessor machine architectures. The slotted priorities architecture shares the resources of a computing system between a general-purpose operating system and a real-time kernel. Software components called executives manage how an instance of a resource is shared. Executives ensure that the RTK can gain access to the resource at precise times. The resulting operating system will be able to guarantee that certain computations will always} complete before their stated deadline. The modifications to the general-purpose operating system are modest.

The architecture is comprised of a resource model, an execution model, and a programming model. The resource model is a classification of resources according to characteristics relevant to the sharing of the resources between the real-time kernel and the general-purpose operating system. The execution model defines how real-time tasks acquire the processor. The programming model defines how programmers write and think about real-time programs for an implementation of the slotted priorities architecture. Finally, we develop a feasibility test which can determine if a set of periodic real-time threads will all meet their deadlines when executed on a system implementing this architecture.

We describe an implementation of the architecture and a set of experiments that validate the implementation. Two real-time demonstration applications were built and executed on the test implementation. Results and analysis of those applications are also presented.

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