This paper presents Q-fabric, which is a set of lightweight, kernel-level abstractions for cooperative, distributed resource management and system/application adaptation. The basis of Q-fabric is its kernel-level, anonymous, asynchronous event service. With this mechanism, (1) applications can monitor and manage the local and remote resources they are using, (2) system-level resource managers can customize their actions to meet the needs of individual applications, and (3) policies can be developed that combine application adaptation with distributed resource management. Results presented in this paper demonstrate the Q-fabric's ability to effectively adapt and manage the resources of a distributed multimedia application. In this application, media streams are adapted at application-level via data down-sampling, and their resources are managed at system-level (e.g., task scheduling) to cope with run-time variations in resource availability. The Q-fabric is implemented as kernel modules on standard Linux platforms.
