Schedulability analysis of global scheduling algorithms on multiprocessor platforms

This paper addresses the schedulability problem of periodic and sporadic real-time task sets with constrained deadlines preemptively scheduled on a multiprocessor platform composed by identical processors. We assume that a global work-conserving scheduler is used and migration from one processor to another is allowed during a task lifetime. First, a general method to derive schedulability conditions for multiprocessor real-time systems will be presented. The analysis will be applied to two typical scheduling algorithms: earliest deadline first (EDF) and fixed priority (FP). Then, the derived schedulability conditions will be tightened, refining the analysis with a simple and effective technique that significantly improves the percentage of accepted task sets. The effectiveness of the proposed test is shown through an extensive set of synthetic experiments

Schedulability analysis of global scheduling algorithms on multiprocessor platforms

This paper addresses the schedulability problem of periodic and sporadic real-time task sets with constrained deadlines preemptively scheduled on a multiprocessor platform composed by identical processors. We assume that a global work-conserving scheduler is used and migration from one processor to another is allowed during a task lifetime. First, a general method to derive schedulability conditions for multiprocessor real-time systems will be presented. The analysis will be applied to two typical scheduling algorithms: earliest deadline first (EDF) and fixed priority (FP). Then, the derived schedulability conditions will be tightened, refining the analysis with a simple and effective technique that significantly improves the percentage of accepted task sets. The effectiveness of the proposed test is shown through an extensive set of synthetic experiments

Response-Time Analysis for Globally Scheduled Symmetric Multiprocessor Platforms

In the last years, a progressive migration from single processor chips to multi-core computing devices has taken place in the general-purpose and embedded system market. The development of multi-processor systems is already a core activity for the most important hardware companies. A lot of different solutions have been proposed to overcome the physical limits of single core devices and to address the increasing computational demand of modern multimedia applications. The real-time community followed this trend with an increasing number of results adapting the classical scheduling analysis to parallel computing systems. This paper will contribute to refine the schedulability analysis for symmetric multi-processor (SMP) real-time systems composed by a set of periodic and sporadic tasks. We will focus on both fixed and dynamic priority global scheduling algorithms, where tasks can migrate from one processor to another during execution. By increasing the complexity of the analysis, we will show that an improvement is possible over existing schedulability tests, significantly increasing the number of schedulable task sets detected. The added computational effort is comparable to the cost of techniques widely used in the uniprocessor case. We believe this is a reasonable cost to pay, given the intrinsically higher complexity of multi-processor devices

New schedulability tests for real-time task sets scheduled by deadline monotonic on multiprocessors

In this paper, we address the problem of schedulability analysis of a set of real-time periodic (or sporadic) tasks on multiprocessor hardware platforms, under fixed priority global scheduling. In a multiprocessor system with M processors, a global scheduler consists of a single queue of ready tasks for all processors, and the scheduler selects the first M tasks to execute on the M processors. We allow preemption and migration of tasks between processors.This paper presents two different contributions. First, we derive a sufficient schedulability test for periodic and sporadic task system scheduled with fixed priority when priorities are assigned according to Deadline Monotonic. This test is efficient when dealing with heavy tasks (i.e. tasks with high utilization). Then, we develop an independent analysis for preperiod deadline systems. This leads to a new schedulability test with density and utilization bounds that are tighter than the existing ones

Improved schedulability analysis of EDF on multiprocessor platforms

Multiprocessor hardware platforms are now being considered for embedded systems, due to their high computational power and little additional cost when compared to single processor systems. When scheduling real-time applications on multiprocessor platforms, a possibility is to use global scheduling, where a scheduling algorithm dynamically assign tasks to processors, and tasks can migrate from one processor to another during their execution. In this paper, we tackle the problem of schedulability analysis of sporadic tasks in global scheduling systems, where the scheduler is the earliest deadline first (EDF) algorithm. We provide two main contributions. First, we show that two recently proposed tests perform poorly when the task set contains heavy tasks (i.e. tasks with high utilization). We also show that neither test dominates the other. As a second contribution, we introduce a new schedulability test that improves significantly the percentage of accepted task sets, especially when considering task sets containing heavy tasks. We show the effectiveness of the proposed test through an extensive set of experiments

EDZL scheduling analysis

A schedulability test is derived for the global Earliest Deadline Zero Laxity (EDZL) scheduling algorithm on a platform with multiple identical processors. The test is sufficient, but not necessary, to guarantee that a system of independent sporadic tasks with arbitrary deadlines will be successfully scheduled, with no missed deadlines, by the multiprocessor EDZL algorithm. Global EDZL is known to be at least as effective as global Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF) in scheduling task sets to meet deadlines. It is shown, by testing on large numbers of pseudo-randomly generated task sets, that the combination of EDZL and the new schedulability test is able to guarantee that far more task sets meet deadlines than the combination of EDF and known EDF schedulability tests.In the second part of the paper, an improved version of the EDZL-schedulability test is presented. This new algorithm is able to efficiently exploit information on the slack values of interfering tasks, to iteratively refine the estimation of the interference a task can be subjected to. This iterative algorithm is shown to have better performance than the initial test, in terms of schedulable task sets detected