Preemptible Atomic Regions for Real-time Java

Abstract

We present a new concurrency control abstraction for real-time systems called preemptible atomic regions (PARs). PARs a transactional mechanism that improves upon lock-based mutual exclusion in several ways. First, and foremost, PARs provide strong correctness guarantees. Any sequence of operations declared atomic will not suffer interference from other threads, even in the presence of programmer errors. In spite of this, PARs can be preempted by high priority tasks; this is essential to the minimization of blocking times. We have implemented PARs in a uniprocessor real-time Java virtual machine and evaluated their utility on a number of programs. The results suggest that programs that use PARs, depending on their semantics, can run faster and experience less jitter than those that use locks.