On the Analysis of Parallel Real-Time Tasks with Spin Locks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the analysis of parallel real-time tasks using spin locks, introducing a more accurate method that jointly considers blocking time, workload, and path length to improve scheduling analysis.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis approach for parallel real-time tasks with spin locks, considering blocking time, workload, and path length jointly for better accuracy.

Findings

More precise blocking time analysis for parallel tasks

Joint consideration of workload and blocking delays

Improved scheduling bounds for real-time systems

Abstract

Locking protocol is an essential component in resource management of real-time systems, which coordinates mutually exclusive accesses to shared resources from different tasks. Although the design and analysis of locking protocols have been intensively studied for sequential real-time tasks, there has been little work on this topic for parallel real-time tasks. In this paper, we study the analysis of parallel real-time tasks using spin locks to protect accesses to shared resources in three commonly used request serving orders (unordered, FIFO-order and priority-order). A remarkable feature making our analysis method more accurate is to systematically analyze the blocking time which may delay a task's finishing time, where the impact to the total workload and the longest path length is jointly considered, rather than analyzing them separately and counting all blocking time as the workload that delays a task's finishing time, as commonly assumed in the state-of-the-art.