Operating Systems

Providing a soft real-time environment using Linux

This research is in the area of Real Time Operating Systems. Using a modified version of Linux, it is possible to run standard, widely used applications within a soft real time environment.

A public release of this software (which is now owned by AT&T Research UK) is available:

Contact: David Ingram

Quality of service for disk accesses in a general-purpose OS

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) for the CPU resource may not be sufficient to ensure predictable service for multimedia applications in a general-purpose OS. This work aims to extend Linux-SRT with the ability to provide Quality of Service for disk usage.

By observing the behaviour of real applications, we hope to determine what the most common modes of CPU-disk coscheduling are. For disk scheduling to be useful, the system requires automatic mechanisms to set appropriate policies. This work builds on past experience with the Nemesis operating system.

Contact: Stephen Childs