A Real-Time Process Scheduling Policy in Windows

Abstract

Microsoft Windows offers a world-class interface and excellent development tools for embedded systems. but, it cannot deliver the necessary real-time feature to meet mission-critical task. In this paper, A real-time process scheduling policy for Microsoft windows running on multiple-core CPU is presented. The policy make use of Microsoft windows' process affinity and the clock interrupt technology. Affinity can limit the process or thread to work on a subset of core on the available CPU, and high-frequency clock interrupt service can drive the real-time processes or threads to switch at an appropriate time. Interrupt Service Routine, that is executed once every clock interrupt, is core of preemptive process scheduling algorithm. Through the experiment, we can see that the policy provides a real-time task environment in Microsoft Windows that the task running period is less than 8ms. And this policy can limit the switching time between processes within a period of 200us.