Support for dynamic QoS in the HARTIK kernel

HARTIK (HArd Real-TIme Kernel) is a real-time kernel that was originally developed for supporting complex robot applications and hard real-time control applications in general. However, in the last few years, the kernel has been modified to introduce support for soft real-time and multimedia applications. Major changes include the development of a new service mechanism, which provides the abstraction of temporal protection, and the implementation of a QoS manager that is capable of adapting the reserved resources to the actual tasks' requirements. In this paper, we report our experience with the new support for dynamic QoS applications, showing how our theoretical solutions have been applied on a real, stable and freely available kernel.