Abstract
Real-time schedulability theory requires a priori knowledge of the worst-case execution time (WCET) of every task in the system. Fundamental to the calculation of WCET is a scheduling policy that determines priorities among tasks. Such policies can be non-preemptive or preemptive. While the former reduces analysis complexity and overhead in implementation, the latter provides increased flexibility in terms of schedulability for higher utilizations of arbitrary task sets. In practice, tasks often have non-preemptive regions but are otherwise scheduled preemptively. To bound the WCET of tasks, architectural features have to be considered in the context of a scheduling scheme. In particular, preemption affects caches, which can be modeled by bounding the cache-related preemption delay (CRPD) of a task. In this paper, we propose a framework that provides safe and tight bounds of the data-cache related preemption delay (D-CRPD), the WCET and the worst-case response times, not just for homogeneous tasks under fully preemptive or fully non-preemptive systems, but for tasks with a non-preemptive region. By retaining the option of preemption where legal, task sets become schedulable that might otherwise not be. Yet, by requiring a region within a task to be non-preemptive, correctness is ensured in terms of arbitration of access to shared resources. Experimental results confirm an increase in schedulability of a task set with nonpreemptive regions over an equivalent task set where only those tasks with non-preemptive regions are scheduled nonpreemptively altogether. Quantitative results further indicate that D-CRPD bounds and response-time bounds comparable to task sets with fully non-preemptive tasks can be retained in the presence of short non-preemptive regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework that performs D-CRPD calculations in a system for tasks with a non-preemptive region.
Comments
Published in Ramaprasad, H., & Mueller, F. (2008). Bounding worst-case response time for tasks with non-preemptive regions. IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, 2008. RTAS '08, 58 - 67. doi: 10.1109/RTAS.2008.18 ©2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.