Utilization-Based Schedulability Test of Real-Time Systems on Virtual Multiprocessors

Abstract

The number of applications that use virtual systems is growing, and one would like to use this kind of systems also for real-time applications with hard deadlines. Virtual machines with many cores are interesting since the underlying physical infrastructure usually contains many cores. We consider hard real-time tasks that execute on a virtual machine with m cores. Tasks are scheduled globally on the cores using fixed-priority preemptive scheduling. This means that a task can execute on different virtual cores at different instances in time. In order to avoid Dhall's effect, which may cause task sets with even very low utilization to miss deadlines, we classify tasks into two priority classes, namely heavy and light tasks. Heavy tasks have higher priority than light tasks. For light tasks we use rate monotonic priority assignment. In this paper we propose a utilization-based test that shows if a task set is schedulable or not. If the task set is schedulable the test provides the priority for each task. The input to the test is the task set, the number of cores in the virtual machine (m), a period for the virtual machine with m cores, and the blocking time when a virtual machine does not have access to the underlying hardware in each period.