Poster Abstract: Using Linked List in Exact Schedulability Tests for Fixed Priority Scheduling

Abstract

Summary form only given. In the context of fixed priority preemptive real-time systems, for n periodic/sporadic tasks that comply with a restrictive system model and that have implicit deadlines the Rate-Monotonic (RM) scheduling is optimal. When these tasks are released simultaneously the time required by the first job of each task defines its response time. It thus needs only to make response time analysis or conduct exact schedulability test within a time length no more than the maximum task period (Tn) for RM scheduling, and these tests are thus known to be pseudo-polynomial in time complexity. Although the response time computation for RM schedules of implicit-deadline task-systems has been proved to be an NPhard problem, the scale of many commercial systems is such that pseudo-polynomial exact tests can be used, and to achieve more efficient exact tests such as for online response time analysis (RTA) is one of important considerations of both research motivation and practice stage. The innovative aspect of our solution is that we use a linked list for representing the schedule in the exact response-time schedulability test, referred to as the LList-based test. A busy period in the schedule is represented by a linked list node, recording the starting time and the end time of a busy period, and the pointer to the next node. The simulation is performed task per task in the priority order (from 1 to n), and, when the starting time or the end time of a busy period is the same as that of other busy periods, then the two nodes are merged into one node to represent a longer busy period. For improving the efficiency, memory allocation and recycle for each node are also performed in the user space. The time complexity of the LList-based test is O(N) where N is the total number of jobs within the time length Tn, while the total number of nodes in the linked list is no more than N - n + 1 in the worst case. Our experiments show that the LList-based exact test is a better candidate in exact response-time tests when task periods span no more than three orders of magnitude, since it outperforms the current best exact tests in this scenario, and the needed memory space is also affordable.