Optimal Multiprocessor Locking Protocols Under FIFO Scheduling

Real-time locking protocols are typically designed to reduce any priority-inversion blocking (pi-blocking) a task may incur while waiting to access a shared resource. For the multiprocessor case, a number of such protocols have been developed that ensure asymptotically optimal pi-blocking bounds under job-level fixed-priority scheduling. Unfortunately, no optimal multiprocessor real-time locking protocols are known that ensure tight pi-blocking bounds under any scheduler. This paper presents the first such protocols. Specifically, protocols are presented for mutual exclusion, reader-writer synchronization, and k-exclusion that are optimal under first-in-first-out (FIFO) scheduling when schedulability analysis treats suspension times as computation. Experiments are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of these protocols

Investigation of implementing a synchronization protocol under multiprocessors hierarchical scheduling

In the multi-core and multiprocessor domain, there has been considerable work done on scheduling techniques assuming that real-time tasks are independent. In practice a typical real-time system usually share logical resources among tasks. However, synchronization in the multiprocessor area has not received enough attention. In this paper we investigate the possibilities of extending multiprocessor hierarchical scheduling to support an existing synchronization protocol (FMLP) in multiprocessor systems. We discuss problems regarding implementation of the synchronization protocol under the multiprocessor hierarchical scheduling

Nested, but Separate: Isolating Unrelated Critical Sections in Real-Time Nested Locking

Prior work has produced multiprocessor real-time locking protocols that ensure asymptotically optimal bounds on priority inversion, that support fine-grained nesting of critical sections, or that are independence-preserving under clustered scheduling. However, while several protocols manage to come with two out of these three desirable features, no protocol to date accomplishes all three. Motivated by this gap in capabilities, this paper introduces the Group Independence-Preserving Protocol (GIPP), the first protocol to support fine-grained nested locking, guarantee a notion of independence preservation for fine-grained nested locking, and ensure asymptotically optimal priority-inversion bounds. As a stepping stone, this paper further presents the Clustered k-Exclusion Independence-Preserving Protocol (CKIP), the first asymptotically optimal independence-preserving k-exclusion lock for clustered scheduling. The GIPP and the CKIP rely on allocation inheritance (a.k.a. migratory priority inheritance) as a key mechanism to accomplish independence preservation

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

Reservation-Based Federated Scheduling for Parallel Real-Time Tasks

This paper considers the scheduling of parallel real-time tasks with arbitrary-deadlines. Each job of a parallel task is described as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In contrast to prior work in this area, where decomposition-based scheduling algorithms are proposed based on the DAG-structure and inter-task interference is analyzed as self-suspending behavior, this paper generalizes the federated scheduling approach. We propose a reservation-based algorithm, called reservation-based federated scheduling, that dominates federated scheduling. We provide general constraints for the design of such systems and prove that reservation-based federated scheduling has a constant speedup factor with respect to any optimal DAG task scheduler. Furthermore, the presented algorithm can be used in conjunction with any scheduler and scheduling analysis suitable for ordinary arbitrary-deadline sporadic task sets, i.e., without parallelism