An open environment for real-time applications

This paper describes an open system architecture that allows independently developed hard real-time applications to run together and supports their reconfiguration at run-time. In the open system, each real-time application is executed by a server. At the lower level, the OS scheduler schedules all the servers on the EDF basis. At the upper level, the server scheduler of each server schedules the ready jobs of the application executed by the server according to the algorithm chosen for the application. The paper describes the two-level CPU scheduling scheme used by the open system and the design and implementation of a uniprocessor open system within the framework of the Windows NT operating system. The implementation consists of three key components: the two-level hierarchical kernel scheduler, common system service providers, and real-time application programming interface.