Supporting Continuous Media in the Piglet OS

Steve Muir, Jonathan Smith1 Distributed Systems Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania fsjmuir,jmsg@dsl.cis.upenn.edu Abstract Specializing operating system (OS) functions on a per-processor basis can provide e cient support for continuous media, providing better management of resources as well as a model with which parallelism can be applied to data streams. The Piglet OS uses this model. We describe how Piglet can provide many of the bene ts of other OS proposals such as verticallystructured operating systems without the need to change the system model seen by end-users. Our implementation of Piglet provides guaranteed network bandwidth using the Virtual Clock algorithm, and supports parallel (pipelined) MPEG decoding using a virtual device interface.