Operating System Support for Multimedia: Survey Nadine Abu Rumman Computer Graphics and Animation Department Princess Sumaya University for Technology Amman, Jordan email: nadine@psut.edu.jo Abstract —Multimedia is an increasingly important part the mix of applications that users run on personal computers and workstations. The requirements placed on a multimedia operating system are demanding and often conflicting. After studying multimedia characteristics and multimedia system requirements, this paper presents a new operating system for multimedia files and applications and it calls this operating system an Optimal Multimedia Operating System as optimal operating system solution for multimedia applications and files and compare this optimal operating system with three existing operating system: QLinux, Mac osx Leopard, Windows Vista. Keywords-component; Multimedia System; Real-Time System; Opti- Multimedia Operating System; QoS; SFQ,; WFQ. I. INTRODUCTION Recently, multimedia is an increasingly important part of mix of applications that users run on personal computers and workstations. Multimedia content in almost every context web pages, consumer products these content rich applications rely on extensive support by the operating system. Multimedia application can be made to run at this level to achieve some of its requirements but actually not real time. Therefore, good OS support is very essential for multimedia applications. The hard ware these days consist of fast processors, large and comparatively fast primary and secondary storage and good network bandwidth. However, multimedia applications perform poorly. Beside this, the DOS's do not support mechanisms to ensure guaranteed completion of a task before a certain deadline. To add to this, kernel operations such as page fault handling , cache miss, interrupts from I/O devices, critical sections and context switch overhead cause unpredictable runtime behavior. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 looks in general for previous work related for this topic, in section 3 talk about general characteristics of multimedia data, application and system, and also in section 4 take a look for specific requirements of multimedia. In section 5, talks about new concept for operating system called Opti-Multimedia Operating System refer to Optimal Multimedia Operating System which show best solution for operating system that support multimedia that not exist in real world the solution uses for comparing with other operating system to choice the exist operating system near to optimal, so then this paper comparing in section 6 Optimal Multimedia Operating system with three existing operating system are Windows Vista, Mac osx Leopard v 10.5 and QLinux. II. RELATED WORKS In the OS context, a randomized fair algorithm, termed lottery scheduling, was proposed in [1].Due to its randomized nature, lottery scheduling achieved fairness only over large time-intervals. This limitation was later addressed by stride scheduling algorithm [2].Several other efforts have investigated scheduling techniques for multimedia systems [1, 5, 8, 13]. These scheduling algorithms are complementary to our hierarchical scheduler and can be employed as leaf class scheduler in our framework. Most of these algorithms require precise characterization of resource requirements of a task (such as computation time and period) as well as admission control to achieve predictable allocation of CPU. In contrast, SFQ requires neither of these; it just requires relative importance of tasks (expressed by weights) to be known. It requires admission control only if the applications desire certain guaranteed minimum CPU bandwidth. Admission control can be avoided when applications only require relative resource allocation. Such flexibility is highly desirable in multimedia systems and the lack of it is one of the main disadvantages of existing algorithms. A detailed experimental investigation of the relative merits of these algorithms visa a via SFQ as a leaf class scheduler is the subject of our current research. III. CHARACTERISTICS OF MULTIMEDIA Multimedia applications have unique characteristics that place new demands on the way the operating system should be managed its resources. The high data rates come from the nature of visual and acoustic information, the eye and the ear can process prodigious amounts of information per second, and have to be fed at that rate to produce an acceptable viewing experience [11], so Multimedia presentations appear to the viewer as continuous streams of video and audio. The data representation is a collection of discrete samples of the source; the audio must be processed periodically for the presentation to appear continuous. Current operating systems do not support the timing guarantees needed by the multimedia applications to ensure QoS. This makes scheduling the most important aspect to design into operating systems. All other operating system management provided is related to ensuring the multimedia application can complete processing within its deadline to 2009 IACSIT Spring Conference 978-0-7695-3653-8/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IACSIT-SC.2009.57 30 2009 International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology - Spring Conference 978-0-7695-3653-8/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IACSIT-SC.2009.57 30