Supporting single and multi-core resource access protocols on object-oriented RTOSes

Abstract

Real-time resource access protocols are fundamental to bound the maximum delay a task can suffer due to priority inversions. Several real-time protocols have been proposed, for both static and dynamic scheduling approaches in single and multi-core processors. One of the main factors for performance efficiency in such protocols is the way they are implement within a real-time operating system (RTOS). In this paper we present an object-oriented design of real-time access protocols considering single and multi-core systems and also suspension- and spin-based protocols (7 protocols in total). Our design aims at reducing the run-time overhead and increasing code re-usability. By implementing the proposed design in an RTOS and running the protocols in a modern multi-core processor, we provide an analysis regarding the memory footprint, run-time overhead, and the impact of the overhead into the schedulability analysis of synthetically generated task sets. Our results indicate that proper implementation provides low run-time overhead (up to 6.1 $$\upmu \hbox {s}$$ ) and impact on the schedulability of real-time tasks.