Real-time multiprocessor locks with nesting: optimizing the common case

Abstract

In prior work on multiprocessor real-time locking protocols, only protocols within the RNLP family support unrestricted lock nesting while guaranteeing asymptotically optimal priority-inversion blocking bounds. However, these protocols support nesting at the expense of increasing the cost of processing non-nested lock requests, which tend to be the common case in practice. To remedy this situation, a new fast-path mechanism is presented herein that extends prior RNLP variants by ensuring that non-nested requests are processed efficiently. This mechanism yields overhead and blocking costs for such requests that are nearly identical to those seen in the most efficient single-resource locking protocols. In experiments, the proposed fast-path mechanism enabled observed blocking times for non-nested requests that were up to 18 times lower than under an existing RNLP variant and improved schedulability over that variant and a simple group lock.