Resource reservations have been proven to be an effective technique to support hard and soft real-time applications in open systems, and some implementations for Linux have already been proposed in the past. However, such implementations generally focus on providing guarantees to real-time applications, disregarding the performance of non real-time activities. In this paper, the problems encountered while using a reservation-based scheduling algorithm in Linux are described, showing why the original algorithm is not suitable for scheduling non real-time activities. Then, the properties required for properly scheduling non real-time tasks are described, and a novel algorithm (called HGRUB) is analyzed, showing how it effectively addresses the presented issues. The performance of HGRUB are then evaluated (by using our implementation in Linux) and compared with the performance of traditional reservation systems.

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