Reflection of developing user-level real-time thread packages

Abstract

In multimedia environments, applications use continuous-media data, such as video data and audio data, to provide users with a wide variety of interaction schemes with computers. Continuous-media applications require more efficient and flexible support from real-time threads than such research real-time systems. To fulfill such requirements, we have been developing user-level real-time threads, which are real-time threads implemented at the user level.We have implemented two user-level real-time thread packages on different operating system platforms, ARTS and RT-Mach. There were several issues, which we considered to design their architectures, such as compatibility, performance, correctness and accuracy. This paper describes the design issues, the lessons we have learned, and the discussions on their development.