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Many suspensions, many problems: a review of self-suspending tasks in real-time systems
Ref: CISTER-TR-181101       Publication Date: Jan 2019

Many suspensions, many problems: a review of self-suspending tasks in real-time systems

Ref: CISTER-TR-181101       Publication Date: Jan 2019

Abstract:
In general computing systems, a job (process/task) may suspend itself whilst it is waiting for some activity to complete, e.g., an accelerator to return data. In real-time systems, such self-suspension can cause substantial performance/schedulability degradation. This observation, first made in 1988, has led to the investigation of the impact of self-suspension on timing predictability, and many relevant results have been published since. Unfortunately, as it has recently come to light, a number of the existing results are flawed. To provide a correct platform on which future research can be built, this paper reviews the state of the art in the design and analysis of scheduling algorithms and schedulability tests for self-suspending tasks in real-time systems. We provide (1) a systematic description of how self-suspending tasks can be handled in both soft and hard real-time systems; (2) an explanation of the existing misconceptions and their potential remedies; (3) an assessment of the influence of such flawed analyses on partitioned multiprocessor fixed-priority scheduling when tasks synchronize access to shared resources; and (4) a discussion of the computational complexity of analyses for different self-suspension task models.

Authors:
Jian-Jia Chen
,
Geoffrey Nelissen
,
Wen-Hung Huang
,
Li Yang
,
Björn B. Brandenburg
,
Konstantinos Bletsas
,
Cong Liu
,
Pascal Richard
,
Frédéric Ridouard
,
Neil Audsley
,
Raj Rajkumar
,
Dionisio de Niz
,
Georg von der Brüggen


Published in Real-time Systems, Springer US, Volume 55, Issue 1, pp 144-207.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-018-9316-9.
ISSN: 1573-1383.

Notes: Paper presented at RTSS 2018, Session 4: Brief Presentations/RTSS@Work



Record Date: 6, Nov, 2018