For the past weeks I have studied the problem of combining multiple thread schedulers within the same NT kernel. Specifically, I modified the NT scheduler and implemented a plug-in interface that allows a specialized thread scheduler to be put in charge of special threads (such as real-time threads) and have the native scheduler divide the unscheduled time slices among the remaining threads. The next project consists of designing a real-time thread scheduling algorithm for multi-processor systems. This algorithm is based on a uni-processor algorithm that combines time constraints and CPU reservations to provide scheduling guarantees for real-time threads.

George Candea
Microsoft Research
One Microsoft Way
Room 9S/1096
Redmond, WA 98052
ph: (425) 882-8080
email: candea@mit.edu