Resource Reservation and Enforcement for Framebuffer-Based Devices

A framebuffer device provides an abstraction for the graphics hardware. The way an application accesses a framebuffer device is to map the framebuffer to the user space for direct access. To guarantee real-time access to a framebuffer, the system should provide reservations; both a budget for the framebuffer usage as well as a budget for running on the CPU. In this paper, we propose an approach to reserve the usages of framebuffer devices through the inclusion of codes in application libraries. Without any modification of the original source code of framebuffer devices, we create a new "virtual" device which maintains internal data structures for framebuffer resource management. With the reservation mechanisms for both framebuffer devices and CPU, we can provide a much smoother display service under heavy system workloads ...