Supporting Multiprocessor Resource Synchronization Protocols in RTEMS

TL;DR

This paper implements and evaluates various multiprocessor resource synchronization protocols in RTEMS, demonstrating their practical performance impacts and comparability to existing protocols like MrsP in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a practical implementation of multiple protocols in RTEMS and analyzes their performance considering real-world overheads.

Findings

Protocols are comparable to MrsP in performance.

Implementation overheads significantly affect protocol efficiency.

Real-world deployment highlights practical considerations for protocol choice.

Abstract

When considering recurrent tasks in real-time systems, concurrent accesses to shared resources, can cause race conditions or data corruptions. Such a problem has been extensively studied since the 1990s, and numerous resource synchronization protocols have been developed for both uni-processor and multiprocessor real-time systems, with the assumption that the implementation overheads are negligible. However, in practice, the implementation overheads may impact the performance of different protocols depending upon the practiced scenarios, e.g., resources are accessed locally or remotely, and tasks spin or suspend themselves when the requested resources are not available. In this paper, to show the applicability of different protocols in real-world systems, we detail the implementation of several state-of-the-art multiprocessor resource synchronization protocols in RTEMS. To study the impact of the implementation overheads, we deploy these implemented protocols on a real platform with synthetic task set. The measured results illustrate that the developed resource synchronization protocols in RTEMS are comparable to the existed protocol, i.e., MrsP.