Comments on "Gang EDF Schedulability Analysis"

This short report raises a correctness issue in the schedulability test presented in Kato et al., "Gang EDF Scheduling of Parallel Task Systems", 30th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, 2009, pp. 459-468

Gang FTP scheduling of periodic and parallel rigid real-time tasks

In this paper we consider the scheduling of periodic and parallel rigid tasks. We provide (and prove correct) an exact schedulability test for Fixed Task Priority (FTP) Gang scheduler sub-classes: Parallelism Monotonic, Idling, Limited Gang, and Limited Slack Reclaiming. Additionally, we study the predictability of our schedulers: we show that Gang FJP schedulers are not predictable and we identify several sub-classes which are actually predictable. Moreover, we extend the definition of rigid, moldable and malleable jobs to recurrent tasks

Real-time scheduling of parallel tasks in the Linux Kernel

This paper proposes a global multiprocessor scheduling algorithm for the Linux kernel that combines the global EDF scheduler with a priority-aware work-stealing load balancing scheme, enabling parallel real-time tasks to be executed on more than one processor at a given time instant. We state that some priority inversion may actually be acceptable, provided it helps reduce contention, communication, synchronisation and coordination between parallel threads, while still guaranteeing the expected system’s predictability. Experimental results demonstrate the low scheduling overhead of the proposed approach comparatively to an existing real-time deadline-oriented scheduling class for the Linux kernel

Scheduling of Hard Real-Time Multi-Thread Periodic Tasks

In this paper we study the scheduling of parallel and real-time recurrent tasks. Firstly, we propose a new parallel task model which allows recurrent tasks to be composed of several threads, each thread requires a single processor for execution and can be scheduled simultaneously. Secondly, we define several kinds of real-time schedulers that can be applied to our parallel task model. We distinguish between two scheduling classes: hierarchical schedulers and global thread schedulers. We present and prove correct an exact schedulability test for each class. Lastly, we also evaluate the performance of our scheduling paradigm in comparison with Gang scheduling by means of simulations

Capacity Augmentation Bound of Federated Scheduling for Parallel DAG Tasks

We present a novel federated scheduling approach for parallel real-time tasks under a general directed acyclic graph (DAG) model. We provide a capacity augmentation bound of 2 for hard real-time scheduling; here we use the worst-case execution time and critical-path length of tasks to determine schedulability. This is the best known capacity augmentation bound for parallel tasks. By constructing example task sets, we further show that the lower bound on capacity augmentation of federated scheduling is also 2 for any m \u3e 2. Hence, the gap is closed and bound 2 is a strict bound for federated scheduling. The federated scheduling algorithm is also a schedulability test that often admits task sets with utilization much greater than 50%m

Federated Scheduling for Stochastic Parallel Real-time Tasks

Federated scheduling is a strategy to schedule parallel real-time tasks: It allocates a dedicated cluster of cores to high-utilization task (utilization \u3e1); It uses a multiprocessor scheduling algorithm to schedule and execute all low-utilization tasks sequentially, on a shared cluster of the remaining cores. Prior work has shown that federated scheduling has the best known capacity augmentation bound of 2 for parallel tasks with implicit deadlines. In this paper, we explore the soft real-time performance of federated scheduling and address the average-case workloads instead of the worst-case values. In particular, we consider stochastic tasks -- tasks for which execution time and critical-path length are random variables. In this case, we use bounded expected tardiness as the schedulability criterion. We define a stochastic capacity augmentation bound and prove that federated scheduling algorithms guarantee the same bound of 2 for stochastic tasks. We present three federated mapping algorithms for core allocation. All of them guarantee bounded expected tardiness and provide the same capacity augmentation bound; In practice, however, we expect them to provide different performances, both in terms of the task sets they can schedule and the actual tardiness they guarantee. Therefore, we performed numerical evaluations using randomly generated task sets to understand the practical differences between the three algorithms

Replica-Aware Co-Scheduling for Mixed-Criticality

Cross-layer fault-tolerance solutions are the key to effectively and efficiently increase the reliability in future safety-critical real-time systems. Replicated software execution with hardware support for error detection is a cross-layer approach that exploits future many-core platforms to increase reliability without resorting to redundancy in hardware. The performance of such systems, however, strongly depends on the scheduler. Standard schedulers, such as Partitioned~Strict Priority Preemptive (SPP) and Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM)-based ones, although widely employed, provide poor performance in face of replicated execution. In this paper, we propose the replica-aware co-scheduling for mixed-critical systems. Experimental results show schedulability improvements of more than 1.5x when compared to TDM and 6.9x when compared to SPP