Resource-Oriented Partitioned Scheduling in Multiprocessor Systems: How to Partition and How to Share?

Abstract

When concurrent real-time tasks have to access shared resources, to prevent race conditions, the synchronization and resource access must ensure mutual exclusion, e.g., by using semaphores. That is, no two concurrent accesses to one shared resource are in their critical sections at the same time. For uniprocessor systems, the priority ceiling protocol (PCP) has been widely accepted and supported in real-time operating systems. However, it is still arguable whether there exists a preferable approach for resource sharing in multiprocessor systems. In this paper, we show that the proposed resource-oriented partitioned scheduling using PCP combined with a reasonable allocation algorithm can achieve a non-trivial speedup factor guarantee. Specifically, we prove that our task mapping and resource allocation algorithm has a speedup factor 11-6/(m+1) on a platform comprising m processors, where a task may request at most one shared resource and the number of requests on any resource by any single job is at most one. Our empirical investigations show that the proposed algorithm is highly effective in terms of task sets deemed schedulable.