Building soft real-time monitors based on software reuse

This paper proposes an integration framework to develop real-time monitor programs based on software reuse. A custom-made real-time monitor program can be quickly built by integrating existing monitor programs in commercial operating systems, where limited real-time system and programming support is provided. We consider issues related to the software control, output re-processing, data age, and interactivities of program executions. The feasibility of this framework is demonstrated by the construction of an integration environment and a soft real-time monitor program consisting of the existing monitor programs PView NT Task Manager, NT Performance Monitor and NT File System Monitor in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Our experimental results show that the incurred system overheads of this approach are very limited