HGS Schedulers for Digital Audio Workstation like Applications

Abstract

Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) applications are real-time applications that have special timing constraints. Hierarchical Group Scheduling (HGS) is a real-time scheduling framework that allows developers implement custom schedulers based on any scheduling algorithm through a process of direct interaction between client threads and their schedulers. Such scheduling could extend well beyond the common priority model that currently exists and could be a representation of arbitrary application semantics that can be well understood and acted upon by its associated scheduler. We like to term it "need based scheduling". In this thesis we first study some DAW implementations and later create a few different HGS schedulers aimed at assisting DAW applications meet their needs.