Supporting time-sensitive applications on a commodity OS

Abstract

Commodity operating systems are increasingly being used for serving time-sensitive applications. These applications require low-latency response from the kernel and from other system-level services. In this paper, we explore various operating systems techniques needed to support time-sensitive applications and describe the design of our Time-Sensitive Linux (TSL) system. We show that the combination of a high-precision timing facility, a well-designed preemptible kernel and the use of appropriate scheduling techniques is the basis for a low-latency response system and such a system can have low overhead. We evaluate the behavior of realistic time-sensitive user- and kernel-level applications on our system and show that, in practice, it is possible to satisfy the constraints of time-sensitive applications in a commodity operating system without significantly compromising the performance of throughput-oriented applications.