Cléopatre: Open-source Operating System Facilities for Real-Time Embedded Applications

In this paper, we present the facilities offered by Cléopatre, a new framework devoted to respond to real-time application developers needs, more particularly for open source environments. The optional components of the operating system library cover a large range of needs in terms of scheduling, synchronization, fault-tolerance and aperiodic task servicing. And we describe some results of a performance evaluation study focusing on overhead and footprint

Scheduling Techniques for Operating Systems for Medical and IoT Devices: A Review

Software and Hardware synthesis are the major subtasks in the implementation of hardware/software systems. Increasing trend is to build SoCs/NoC/Embedded System for Implantable Medical Devices (IMD) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which includes multiple Microprocessors and Signal Processors, allowing designing complex hardware and software systems, yet flexible with respect to the delivered performance and executed application. An important technique, which affect the macroscopic system implementation characteristics is the scheduling of hardware operations, program instructions and software processes. This paper presents a survey of the various scheduling strategies in process scheduling. Process Scheduling has to take into account the real-time constraints. Processes are characterized by their timing constraints, periodicity, precedence and data dependency, pre-emptivity, priority etc. The affect of these characteristics on scheduling decisions has been described in this paper

The jointly scheduling of hard periodic tasks with soft aperiodic events within the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ)

The studied problem is the jointly scheduling of hard periodic tasks with soft aperiodic events, where the response times of soft tasks have to be as low as possible while the warranty to meet their deadlines has to be given to hard tasks. A lot of theoretical solutions have been proposed these past two decades but we are interested on the implementability of these solutions under the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ), without changing the scheduler. This led us to adapt the existing algorithms to operate at a user land level in the system, to propose some optimizations and counter measures in order to balance the lost of performances and finally to set up an approximate slack stealer algorithm specifically designed to take into account RTSJ restrictions. We propose new classes to extend the RTSJ API's to implement these mechanisms and some minor modification suggestions to existing ones as a feed back from our RTSJ experiences. We demonstrates the efficiency of the modified algorithms through extensive simulations and the implementability on available RTSJ compliant virtual machine by an overhead measure in real situation with the RTSJ JamaïcaVM from Aïcas. We also measure the overhead on LejosRT, an RTSJ compliant firmware for Lego Mindstorms NXT in development

Real-time disk scheduling in a mixed-media file system

This paper presents our real-time disk scheduler called the Delta L scheduler, which optimizes unscheduled best-effort disk requests by giving priority to best-effort disk requests while meeting real-time request deadlines. Our scheduler tries to execute real-time disk requests as much as possible in the background. Only when real-time request deadlines are endangered, our scheduler gives priority to real-time disk requests. The Delta L disk scheduler is part of our mixed-media file system called Clockwise. An essential part of our work is extensive and detailed raw disk performance measurements. The Delta L disk scheduler for its real-time schedulability analysis and to decide whether scheduling a best-effort request before a real-time request violates real-time constraints uses these raw performance measurements. Further, a Clockwise off-line simulator uses the raw performance measurements where a number of different disk schedulers are compared. We compare the Delta L scheduler with a prioritizing Latest Start Time (LST) scheduler and non-prioritizing EDF scheduler. The Delta L scheduler is comparable to LST in achieving low latencies for best-effort requests under light to moderate real-time loads and better in achieving low latencies for best-effort requests for extreme real-time loads. The simulator is calibrated to an actual Clockwise. Clockwise runs on a 200MHz Pentium-Pro based PC with PCI bus, multiple SCSI controllers and disks on Linux 2.2.x and the Nemesis kernel. Clockwise performance is dictated by the hardware: all available bandwidth can be committed to real-time streams, provided hardware overloads do not occur

Real-time Scheduling of periodic tasks in a monoprocessor system with a rechargeable battery

International audienceWe are interested in a real-time computing system that is powered through a rechargeable battery. In this context, two constraints need to be addressed: energy and deadlines. Classical task scheduling, in particular Earliest Deadline First, only accounts for timing parameters of the tasks and conse- quently is not suitable when considering energy constraints. We show here how to modify Earliest Deadline so as to account for the properties of the energy source, capacity of the energy storage as well as energy consumption of the tasks. We present an exact feasibility test that decides for periodic task sets, whether they can be scheduled without deadline violations. To this end, we introduce the concepts of energy demand and slack energy

Scheduling Techniques for Operating Systems for Medical and IoT Devices: A Review

Software and Hardware synthesis are the major subtasks in the implementation of hardware/software systems. Increasing trend is to build SoCs/NoC/Embedded System for Implantable Medical Devices (IMD) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which includes multiple Microprocessors and Signal Processors, allowing designing complex hardware and software systems, yet flexible with respect to the delivered performance and executed application. An important technique, which affect the macroscopic system implementation characteristics is the scheduling of hardware operations, program instructions and software processes. This paper presents a survey of the various scheduling strategies in process scheduling. Process Scheduling has to take into account the real-time constraints. Processes are characterized by their timing constraints, periodicity, precedence and data dependency, pre-emptivity, priority etc. The affect of these characteristics on scheduling decisions has been described in this paper

Load Profiling in Distributed Real-Time Systems

Load balancing is often used to ensure that nodes in a distributed systems are equally loaded. In this paper, we show that for real-time systems, load balancing is not desirable. In particular, we propose a new load-profiling strategy that allows the nodes of a distributed system to be unequally loaded. Using load profiling, the system attempts to distribute the load amongst its nodes so as to maximize the chances of finding a node that would satisfy the computational needs of incoming real-time tasks. To that end, we describe and evaluate a distributed load-profiling protocol for dynamically scheduling time-constrained tasks in a loosely-coupled distributed environment. When a task is submitted to a node, the scheduling software tries to schedule the task locally so as to meet its deadline. If that is not feasible, it tries to locate another node where this could be done with a high probability of success, while attempting to maintain an overall load profile for the system. Nodes in the system inform each other about their state using a combination of multicasting and gossiping. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated via simulation, and is contrasted to other dynamic scheduling protocols for real-time distributed systems. Based on our findings, we argue that keeping a diverse availability profile and using passive bidding (through gossiping) are both advantageous to distributed scheduling for real-time systems.National Science Foundation (CCR-9308344

Proceedings Work-In-Progress Session of the 13th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium

The Work-In-Progress session of the 13th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS\u2707) presents papers describing contributions both to state of the art and state of the practice in the broad field of real-time and embedded systems. The 17 accepted papers were selected from 19 submissions. This proceedings is also available as Washington University in St. Louis Technical Report WUCSE-2007-17, at http://www.cse.seas.wustl.edu/Research/FileDownload.asp?733. Special thanks go to the General Chairs – Steve Goddard and Steve Liu and Program Chairs - Scott Brandt and Frank Mueller for their support and guidance

Co-scheduling Real-time Tasks and Non Real-time Tasks Using Empirical Probability Distribution of Execution Time Requirements

We present a novel co-scheduling algorithm for real-time (RT) and non real-time response time sensitive (TS) tasks. Previous co-scheduling algorithms focussed on providing isolation to the tasks without considering the impact of scheduling of the RT tasks on the response times of the TS tasks. To best utilize the available processing capacity, the number of jobs qualifying for acceptable performance should be maximized. A good scheduling algorithm would reduce the deadline overrun times for soft real-time tasks and the response times for the TS tasks, while meeting deadline guarantees for the RT tasks. We present a formulation of optimal co-scheduling algorithm and show that such an algorithm would minimize the expected processor share of RT tasks at any instant. We propose Stochastic Processor Sharing (SPS) algorithm that uses the empirical probability distribution of execution times of the RT tasks to schedule the RT tasks such that their maximum expected processor share at any instant is minimized. We show theoretically and empirically that SPS provideds significant performance benefits in terms of reducing response times of TS jobs over current co-scheduling algorithms