Deadlock prevention in concurrent real-time systems

Abstract

To meet consistency requirements found in concurrent applications, a process must be guaranteed that it will be able to use all resources in a set ofpassive resources (such as shared data structures). To provide predictable execution time required in real-time systems, a process also needs guaranteed access to at least one of a set ofactive resources (such as processors) associated with each passive resource. As such, a concurrent real-time-process has AND-OR resource requirements. If locking is used to provide exclusive access to resources, deadlock is possible since processes can request additional resources while holding other resources. Deadlock detection and recovery techniques and deadlock avoidance techniques typically involve preempting resources or terminating processes, and are therefore inappropriate for real-time systems that require the execution time of processes to be predictable. This paper describes a general resource request condition that we proveprevents deadlock in AND-OR systems. It also describes how we use this AND-OR deadlock prevention technique in a concurrent real-time system.