The Design and Implementation of the CPU Power

This paper describes a Windows NT/95 utility, the CPU Power Regulator (CPR), which improves the capability of Windows NT/95 in servicing time-critical applications. CPR considers a distance model 4] to service time-critical applications such as multimedia softwares and electronic games in a timely fashion. Distinct from the past work 7, 8, 9], CPR adopts a user-level control mechanism to manage the resource allocations on Windows NT/95 and makes no modi-cations to the operating system and application soft-wares. The performance of CPR was veriied by a collection of simulation experiments of randomly generated and realistic workloads. CPR not only introduces very low system overheads but also largely reduces the phenomenon of non-timely resource allocation for applications. The experimental results also demonstrate the capability and exibility of CPR in multiplexing CPU cycles to provide diierent 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 operating system.