Implementation and evaluation of mixed-criticality scheduling approaches for sporadic tasks

Abstract

Traditional fixed-priority scheduling analysis for periodic and sporadic task sets is based on the assumption that all tasks are equally critical to the correct operation of the system. Therefore, every task has to be schedulable under the chosen scheduling policy, and estimates of tasks' worst-case execution times must be conservative in case a task runs longer than is usual. To address the significant underutilization of a system's resources under normal operating conditions that can arise from these assumptions, several mixed-criticality scheduling approaches have been proposed. However, to date, there have been few quantitative comparisons of system schedulability or runtime overhead for the different approaches. In this article, we present a side-by-side implementation and evaluation of the known mixed-criticality scheduling approaches, for periodic and sporadic mixed-criticality tasks on uniprocessor systems, under a mixed-criticality scheduling model that is common to all these approaches. To make a fair evaluation of mixed-criticality scheduling, we also address previously open issues and propose modifications to improve particular approaches. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that user-space implementations of mechanisms to enforce different mixed-criticality scheduling approaches can be achieved atop Linux without kernel modification, with reasonably low (but in some cases nontrivial) overhead for mixed-criticality real-time task sets.