KS2010: Deadline scheduling

"Linus wasn't going for it. He says that multimedia people don't want the video player to be rejected if the scheduler can't guarantee the deadlines; they want a best-effort attempt to play the video."

Applications may always have a fall-back mechanism: try to go (really) real-time, if that's not possible, then go best-effort, possibly with some UI trick for letting the user know he's running too many RT applications. That already happens with RT priorities: applications (e.g., jack) try to acquire RT prio, if that fails, they log a warning/error and they run anyway without it.

Or, you can have a more elaborate user-space middle-ware that allows to manage overload situations, e.g., have a look at the FRESCOR Application Level Contracts (ALC): http://www.frescor.org/index.php?page=publications.