17th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium: Work in Progress Sessions

This paper describes a Windows NT utility the CPU Power Regulator CPR which improves the ca pability of Windows NT in servicing time critical applications CPR considers a distance model to service time critical applications such as multimedia softwares and electronic games in a timely fashion Distinct from the past work CPR adopts a user level control mechanism to manage the resource allocations on Windows NT and makes no modi cations to the operating system and application soft wares The performance of CPR was veri ed by a col lection of simulation experiments of randomly gener ated and realistic workloads CPR not only introduces very low system overheads but also largely reduces the phenomenon of non timely resource allocation for ap plications The experimental results also demonstrate the capability and exibility of CPR in multiplexing CPU cycles to provide di erent degrees of quality of service to time critical applications The results of this work present a low cost software solution to transform an ordinary operating system into a multimedia oper ating system