AbstractThe Java platform has many characteristics that make it very desirable for integrated continuous media processing. Unfortunately, it lacks the necessary CPU resource management facilities to support quality of service (QoS) guarantees for soft real‐time multimedia tasks. In this paper, we present our new Java Virtual Machine, Q‐JVM, which brings CPU resource management to the Java platform. Q‐JVM is based on Sun's JVM version 1.1.5. It implements an enhanced version of the MTR‐LS algorithm in its thread scheduler. Combined with admission control that could be implemented in an application‐level resource manager, it is able to support QoS parameters such as fairness, bandwidth partitioning and delay bound guarantees, as well as the cumulative service guarantee. Our test results show that Q‐JVM is backward compatible with the standard JVM from Sun, has low scheduling overhead, and is able to provide QoS guarantees as specified. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.