Multimedia Applications on a Unix SVR4 Kernel: Performance Study

Abstract. End-system resource management is a key issue for obtaining satisfying QoS in multimedia applications. As these applications are being incorporated into workstations, problems regarding efficient and well suited operating system mechanisms to cope with multimedia data constraints have been outlined. In this paper we present a runtime kernel analysis of an adaptive multimedia application dealing with compressed audio and video, which is structured as different communicating processes, running on Solaris 2.4. These processes are not independent, and their interactions determine the applications overall performance. We show that even if application structure is optimised, the fact that synchronisation between processes exists but is not considered by the process scheduling policy , results in unnecessary data cop ying and image rejection and consequently poor performances. Our measurements of application performance highlight the need for a system level synchronisation support.