Scheduling Self-Suspending Tasks: New and Old Results

In computing systems, a job may suspend itself (before it finishes its execution) when it has to wait for certain results from other (usually external) activities. For real-time systems, such self-suspension behavior has been shown to induce performance degradation. Hence, the researchers in the real-time systems community have devoted themselves to the design and analysis of scheduling algorithms that can alleviate the performance penalty due to self-suspension behavior. As self-suspension and delegation of parts of a job to non-bottleneck resources is pretty natural in many applications, researchers in the operations research (OR) community have also explored scheduling algorithms for systems with such suspension behavior, called the master-slave problem in the OR community. This paper first reviews the results for the master-slave problem in the OR literature and explains their impact on several long-standing problems for scheduling self-suspending real-time tasks. For frame-based periodic real-time tasks, in which the periods of all tasks are identical and all jobs related to one frame are released synchronously, we explore different approximation metrics with respect to resource augmentation factors under different scenarios for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems, and demonstrate that different approximation metrics can create different levels of difficulty for the approximation. Our experimental results show that such more carefully designed schedules can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art

A Note on the Period Enforcer Algorithm for Self-Suspending Tasks

The period enforcer algorithm for self-suspending real-time tasks is a technique for suppressing the "back-to-back" scheduling penalty associated with deferred execution. Originally proposed in 1991, the algorithm has attracted renewed interest in recent years. This note revisits the algorithm in the light of recent developments in the analysis of self-suspending tasks, carefully re-examines and explains its underlying assumptions and limitations, and points out three observations that have not been made in the literature to date: (i) period enforcement is not strictly superior (compared to the base case without enforcement) as it can cause deadline misses in self-suspending task sets that are schedulable without enforcement; (ii) to match the assumptions underlying the analysis of the period enforcer, a schedulability analysis of self-suspending tasks subject to period enforcement requires a task set transformation for which no solution is known in the general case, and which is subject to exponential time complexity (with current techniques) in the limited case of a single self-suspending task; and (iii) the period enforcer algorithm is incompatible with all existing analyses of suspension-based locking protocols, and can in fact cause ever-increasing suspension times until a deadline is missed

Many suspensions, many problems: a review of self-suspending tasks in real-time systems

In general computing systems, a job (process/task) may suspend itself whilst it is waiting for some activity to complete, e.g., an accelerator to return data. In real-time systems, such self-suspension can cause substantial performance/schedulability degradation. This observation, first made in 1988, has led to the investigation of the impact of self-suspension on timing predictability, and many relevant results have been published since. Unfortunately, as it has recently come to light, a number of the existing results are flawed. To provide a correct platform on which future research can be built, this paper reviews the state of the art in the design and analysis of scheduling algorithms and schedulability tests for self-suspending tasks in real-time systems. We provide (1) a systematic description of how self-suspending tasks can be handled in both soft and hard real-time systems; (2) an explanation of the existing misconceptions and their potential remedies; (3) an assessment of the influence of such flawed analyses on partitioned multiprocessor fixed-priority scheduling when tasks synchronize access to shared resources; and (4) a discussion of the computational complexity of analyses for different self-suspension task models

Offloading Safety- and Mission-Critical Tasks via Unreliable Connections

For many cyber-physical systems, e.g., IoT systems and autonomous vehicles, offloading workload to auxiliary processing units has become crucial. However, since this approach highly depends on network connectivity and responsiveness, typically only non-critical tasks are offloaded, which have less strict timing requirements than critical tasks. In this work, we provide two protocols allowing to offload critical and non-critical tasks likewise, while providing different service levels for non-critical tasks in the event of an unsuccessful offloading operation, depending on the respective system requirements. We analyze the worst-case timing behavior of the local cyber-physical system and, based on these analyses, we provide a sufficient schedulability test for each of the proposed protocols. In the course of comprehensive experiments, we show that our protocols have reasonable acceptance ratios under the provided schedulability tests. Moreover, we demonstrate that the system behavior under our proposed protocols is strongly dependent on probability of unsuccessful offloading operations, the percentage of critical tasks in the system, and the amount of offloaded workload

EDF-Like Scheduling for Self-Suspending Real-Time Tasks

In real-time systems, schedulability tests are utilized to provide timing guarantees. However, for self-suspending task sets, current suspension-aware schedulability tests are limited to Task-Level Fixed-Priority~(TFP) scheduling or Earliest-Deadline-First~(EDF) with constrained-deadline task systems. In this work we provide a unifying schedulability test for the uniprocessor version of Global EDF-Like (GEL) schedulers and arbitrary-deadline task sets. A large body of existing scheduling algorithms can be considered as EDF-Like, such as EDF, First-In-First-Out~(FIFO), Earliest-Quasi-Deadline-First~(EQDF) and Suspension-Aware EDF~(SAEDF). Therefore, the unifying schedulability test is applicable to those algorithms. Moreover, the schedulability test can be applied to TFP scheduling as well. Our analysis is the first suspension-aware schedulability test applicable to arbitrary-deadline sporadic real-time task systems under Job-Level Fixed-Priority (JFP) scheduling, such as EDF. Moreover, it is the first unifying suspension-aware schedulability test framework that covers a wide range of scheduling algorithms. Through numerical simulations, we show that the schedulability test outperforms the state of the art for EDF under constrained-deadline scenarios. Moreover, we demonstrate the performance of different configurations under EQDF and SAEDF

On Strong and Weak Sustainability, with an Application to Self-Suspending Real-Time Tasks

Motivated by an apparent contradiction regarding whether certain scheduling policies are sustainable, we revisit the topic of sustainability in real-time scheduling and argue that the existing definitions of sustainability should be further clarified and generalized. After proposing a formal, generic sustainability theory, we relax the existing notion of (strongly) sustainable scheduling policy to provide a new classification called weak sustainability. Proving weak sustainability properties allows reducing the number of variables that must be considered in the search of a worst-case schedule, and hence enables more efficient schedulability analyses and testing regimes even for policies that are not (strongly) sustainable. As a proof of concept, and to better understand a model for which many mistakes were found in the literature, we study weak sustainability in the context of dynamic self-suspending tasks, where we formalize a generic suspension model using the Coq proof assistant and provide a machine-checked proof that any JLFP scheduling policy is weakly sustainable with respect to job costs and variable suspension times

On the Pitfalls of Resource Augmentation Factors and Utilization Bounds in Real-Time Scheduling

In this paper, we take a careful look at speedup factors, utilization bounds, and capacity augmentation bounds. These three metrics have been widely adopted in real-time scheduling research as the de facto standard theoretical tools for assessing scheduling algorithms and schedulability tests. Despite that, it is not always clear how researchers and designers should interpret or use these metrics. In studying this area, we found a number of surprising results, and related to them, ways in which the metrics may be misinterpreted or misunderstood. In this paper, we provide a perspective on the use of these metrics, guiding researchers on their meaning and interpretation, and helping to avoid pitfalls in their use. Finally, we propose and demonstrate the use of parametric augmentation functions as a means of providing nuanced information that may be more relevant in practical settings

On Strong and Weak Sustainability, with an Application to Self-Susp ending Real-Time Tasks

Motivated by an apparent contradiction regarding whether certain scheduling policies are sustainable, we revisit the topic of sustainability in real-time scheduling and argue that the existing definitions of sustainability should be further clarified and generalized. After proposing a formal, generic sustainability theory, we relax the existing notion of (strongly) sustainable scheduling policy to provide a new classification called weak sustainability. Proving weak sustainability properties allows reducing the number of variables that must be considered in the search of a worst-case schedule, and hence enables more efficient schedulability analyses and testing regimes even for policies that are not (strongly) sustainable. As a proof of concept, and to better understand a model for which many mistakes were found in the literature, we study weak sustainability in the context of dynamic self-suspending tasks, where we formalize a generic suspension model using the Coq proof assistant and provide a machine-checked proof that any JLFP scheduling policy is weakly sustainable with respect to job costs and variable suspension times.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Unifying Response Time Analysis Framework for Dynamic Self-Suspending Tasks

28th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 16). 5 to 8, Jul, 2016. Toulouse, France.For real-time embedded systems, self-suspending behaviors can cause substantial performance/schedulability degradations. In this paper, we focus on preemptive fixed-priority scheduling for the dynamic self-suspension task model on uniprocessor. This model assumes that a job of a task can dynamically suspend itself during its execution (for instance, to wait for shared resources or access co-processors or external devices). The total suspension time of a job is upper-bounded, but this dynamic behavior drastically influences the interference generated by this task on lower-priority tasks. The state-of-the-art results for this task model can be classified into three categories (i) modeling suspension as computation, (ii) modeling suspension as release jitter, and (iii) modeling suspension as a blocking term. However, several results associated to the release jitter approach have been recently proven to be erroneous, and the concept of modeling suspension as blocking was never formally proven correct. This paper presents a unifying response time analysis framework for the dynamic self-suspending task model. We provide a rigorous proof and show that the existing analyses pertaining to the three categories mentioned above are analytically dominated by our proposed solution. Therefore, all those techniques are in fact correct, but they are inferior to the proposed response time analysis in this paper. The evaluation results show that our analysis framework can generate huge improvements (an increase of up to 50% of the number of task sets deemed schedulable) over these state-of-the-art analyses.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Errata for three papers (2004-05) on fixed-priority scheduling with self-suspensions

The purpose of this article is to (i) highlight the flaws in three previously published works [3][2][7] on the worst-case response time analysis for tasks with self-suspensions and (ii) provide straightfor- ward fixes for those flaws, hence rendering the ana- lysis safe