Hierarchical Real Time Scheduling and Synchronization

Abstract:  The Hierarchical Scheduling Framework (HSF) has been introduced to enable compositional schedulability analysis and execution of embedded software systems with real-time constraints. In this thesis, we consider a system consisting of a number of semi-independent components called subsystems, and these subsystems are allowed to share logical resources. The HSF provides CPU-time to the subsystems and it guarantees that the individual subsystems respect their allocated CPU budgets. However, if subsystems are allowed to share logical resources, extra complexity with respect to analysis and run-time mechanisms is introduced. In this thesis we address three issues related to hierarchical scheduling of semi-independent subsystems. In the first part, we investigate the feasibility of implementing the hierarchical scheduling framework in a commercial operating system, and we present the detailed figures of various key properties with respect to the overhead of the implementation.In the second part, we studied the problem of supporting shared resources in a hierarchical scheduling framework and we propose two different solutions to support resource sharing. The first proposed solution is called SIRAP, a synchronization protocol for resource sharing in hierarchically scheduled open real-time systems, and the second solution is an enhanced overrun mechanism.In the third part, we present a resource efficient approach to minimize system load (i.e., the collective CPU requirements to guarantee the schedulability of hierarchically scheduled subsystems). Our work is motivated from a tradeoff between reducing resource locking times and reducing system load. We formulate an optimization problem that determines the resource locking times of each individual subsystem with the goal of minimizing the system load subject to system schedulability. We present linear complexity algorithms to find an optimal solution to the problem, and we prove their correctness