Lock-Based Resource Sharing for Real-Time Multiprocessors

Sammanfattning: Embedded systems are widely used in the industry and are typically resource constrained, i.e., resources such as processors, I/O devices, shared buffers or shared memory might be limited in the system. Hence, techniques that can enable an efficient usage of processor bandwidths in such systems are of great importance. Locked-based resource sharing protocols are proposed as a solution to overcome resource limitation by allowing the available resources in the system to be safely shared. In recent years, due to a dramatic enhancement in the functionality of systems, a shift from single-core processors to multi-core processors has become inevitable from an industrial perspective to tackle the raised challenges due to increased system complexity. However, the resource sharing protocols are not fully mature for multi-core processors. The two classical multi-core processor resource sharing protocols, spin-based and suspension-based protocols, although providing mutually exclusive access to resources, can introduce long blocking delays to tasks, which may be unacceptable for many industrial applications. In this thesis we enhance the performance of resource sharing protocols for partitioned scheduling, which is the de-facto scheduling standard for industrial real-time multi-core processor systems such as in AUTOSAR, in terms of timing and memory requirements. A new scheduling approach uses a resource efficient hybrid approach combining both partitioned and global scheduling where the partitioned scheduling is used to schedule the major number of tasks in the system. In such a scheduling approach applications with critical task sets use partitioned scheduling to achieve higher level of predictability. Then the unused bandwidth on each core that is remained from partitioning is used to schedule less critical task sets using global scheduling to achieve higher system utilization. These scheduling schema however lacks a proper resource sharing protocol since the existing protocols designed for partitioned and global scheduling cannot be directly applied due to the complex hybrid structure of these scheduling frameworks. In this thesis we propose a resource sharing solution for such a complex structure. Further, we provide the blocking bounds incurred to tasks under the proposed protocols and enhance the schedulability analysis, which is an essential requirement for real-time systems, with the provided blocking bounds.