Particularly during times of overload, when the resources available are not sufficient to meet the needs of all applications, the resource allocation in a multimedia client must involve the user to a greater extent than in the past since only the user knows his relative priorities among competing processes. Neither the kernel nor the processes can entirely determine this ranking because of the very nature of multimedia applications. Some information may be gathered and priority may be deduced from input events generated by the user, but the actions of watching a window or listening to a speaker are not presently detectable. The key to effective and feasible resource allocation is for the user's involvement to be simple and infrequent. We treat the user's interest as a limited resource, a viewpoint which should resonate with most people in our media-saturated information age.
Processes compete for the interest of the user like they compete for CPU cycles.
Our user-centric resource allocation scheme thus allocates resources to applications proportional to their share of the user's interest. The ideal characteristics of a multimedia client resource allocation scheme may not in fact be simultaneously realizable, but it helps to keep them in mind when looking at new approaches to the problem. Their conclusion is that none of the existing approaches simultaneously satisfies the requirements for resource allocation in a mixed conventional and real-time workload environment. Both efforts show significantly improved performance compared to traditional, real-time, and weighted fair queuing schedulers. Our approach is non- traditional, simpler, and we hope will perform equally well.