THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Support for multimedia applications by general purpose computing platf orms has been the subject of considerable research, Much of this work is based on an evolutionary strategy in which small changes to existin g systems are made, The approach adopted here is to start ab initio wi th no backward compatibility constraints, This leads to a novel struct ure for an operating system, The structure aims to decouple applicatio ns from one another and to provide multiplexing of all resources, not just the CPU, at a low level, The motivation for this structure, a des ign based on the structure, and its implementation on a number of hard ware platforms is described.