1,161 research outputs found
An optimal fixed-priority assignment algorithm for supporting fault-tolerant hard real-time systems
The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present an appropriate schedulability analysis, based on response time analysis, for supporting fault-tolerant hard real-time systems. We consider systems that make use of error-recovery techniques to carry out fault tolerance. Second, we propose a new priority assignment algorithm which can be used, together with the schedulability analysis, to improve system fault resilience. These achievements come from the observation that traditional priority assignment policies may no longer be appropriate when faults are being considered. The proposed schedulability analysis takes into account the fact that the recoveries of tasks may be executed at higher priority levels. This characteristic is very important since, after an error, a task certainly has a shorter period of time to meet its deadline. The proposed priority assignment algorithm, which uses some properties of the analysis, is very efficient. We show that the method used to find out an appropriate priority assignment reduces the search space from O(n!) to O(n/sup 2/), where n is the number of task recovery procedures. Also, we show that the priority assignment algorithm is optimal in the sense that the fault resilience of task sets is maximized as for the proposed analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by simulation
Supporting Read/Write Applications in Embedded Real-time Systems via Suspension-aware Analysis
In many embedded real-time systems, applications often interact with I/O
devices via read/write operations, which may incur considerable suspension
delays. Unfortunately, prior analysis methods for validating timing correctness
in embedded systems become quite pessimistic when suspension delays are
present. In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting two common types
of I/O applications in a multiprocessor system, that is, write-only
applications and read-write applications. For the write-only application model,
we present a much improved analysis technique that results in only O(m)
suspension-related utilization loss, where m is the number of processors. For
the second application model, we present a flexible I/O placement strategy and
a corresponding new scheduling algorithm, which can completely circumvent the
negative impact due to read- and write-induced suspension delays. We illustrate
the feasibility of the proposed I/O-placement-based schedule via a case study
implementation. Furthermore, experiments presented herein show that the
improvement with respect to system utilization over prior methods is often
significant
k2U: A General Framework from k-Point Effective Schedulability Analysis to Utilization-Based Tests
To deal with a large variety of workloads in different application domains in
real-time embedded systems, a number of expressive task models have been
developed. For each individual task model, researchers tend to develop
different types of techniques for deriving schedulability tests with different
computation complexity and performance. In this paper, we present a general
schedulability analysis framework, namely the k2U framework, that can be
potentially applied to analyze a large set of real-time task models under any
fixed-priority scheduling algorithm, on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor
scheduling. The key to k2U is a k-point effective schedulability test, which
can be viewed as a "blackbox" interface. For any task model, if a corresponding
k-point effective schedulability test can be constructed, then a sufficient
utilization-based test can be automatically derived. We show the generality of
k2U by applying it to different task models, which results in new and improved
tests compared to the state-of-the-art.
Analogously, a similar concept by testing only k points with a different
formulation has been studied by us in another framework, called k2Q, which
provides quadratic bounds or utilization bounds based on a different
formulation of schedulability test. With the quadratic and hyperbolic forms,
k2Q and k2U frameworks can be used to provide many quantitive features to be
measured, like the total utilization bounds, speed-up factors, etc., not only
for uniprocessor scheduling but also for multiprocessor scheduling. These
frameworks can be viewed as a "blackbox" interface for schedulability tests and
response-time analysis
A C-DAG task model for scheduling complex real-time tasks on heterogeneous platforms: preemption matters
Recent commercial hardware platforms for embedded real-time systems feature
heterogeneous processing units and computing accelerators on the same
System-on-Chip. When designing complex real-time application for such
architectures, the designer needs to make a number of difficult choices: on
which processor should a certain task be implemented? Should a component be
implemented in parallel or sequentially? These choices may have a great impact
on feasibility, as the difference in the processor internal architectures
impact on the tasks' execution time and preemption cost. To help the designer
explore the wide space of design choices and tune the scheduling parameters, in
this paper we propose a novel real-time application model, called C-DAG,
specifically conceived for heterogeneous platforms. A C-DAG allows to specify
alternative implementations of the same component of an application for
different processing engines to be selected off-line, as well as conditional
branches to model if-then-else statements to be selected at run-time. We also
propose a schedulability analysis for the C-DAG model and a heuristic
allocation algorithm so that all deadlines are respected. Our analysis takes
into account the cost of preempting a task, which can be non-negligible on
certain processors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large
set of synthetic experiments by comparing with state of the art algorithms in
the literature
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