Hardware/Software Design of Dynamic Real-Time Schedulers for Embedded Multiprocessor Systems

Tucci, Primiano (2013) Hardware/Software Design of Dynamic Real-Time Schedulers for Embedded Multiprocessor Systems, [Dissertation thesis], Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. Dottorato di ricerca in Ingegneria elettronica, informatica e delle telecomunicazioni, 25 Ciclo. DOI 10.6092/unibo/amsdottorato/5594.
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Abstract

The new generation of multicore processors opens new perspectives for the design of embedded systems. Multiprocessing, however, poses new challenges to the scheduling of real-time applications, in which the ever-increasing computational demands are constantly flanked by the need of meeting critical time constraints. Many research works have contributed to this field introducing new advanced scheduling algorithms. However, despite many of these works have solidly demonstrated their effectiveness, the actual support for multiprocessor real-time scheduling offered by current operating systems is still very limited. This dissertation deals with implementative aspects of real-time schedulers in modern embedded multiprocessor systems. The first contribution is represented by an open-source scheduling framework, which is capable of realizing complex multiprocessor scheduling policies, such as G-EDF, on conventional operating systems exploiting only their native scheduler from user-space. A set of experimental evaluations compare the proposed solution to other research projects that pursue the same goals by means of kernel modifications, highlighting comparable scheduling performances. The principles that underpin the operation of the framework, originally designed for symmetric multiprocessors, have been further extended first to asymmetric ones, which are subjected to major restrictions such as the lack of support for task migrations, and later to re-programmable hardware architectures (FPGAs). In the latter case, this work introduces a scheduling accelerator, which offloads most of the scheduling operations to the hardware and exhibits extremely low scheduling jitter. The realization of a portable scheduling framework presented many interesting software challenges. One of these has been represented by timekeeping. In this regard, a further contribution is represented by a novel data structure, called addressable binary heap (ABH). Such ABH, which is conceptually a pointer-based implementation of a binary heap, shows very interesting average and worst-case performances when addressing the problem of tick-less timekeeping of high-resolution timers.

Abstract
Tipologia del documento
Tesi di dottorato
Autore
Tucci, Primiano
Supervisore
Co-supervisore
Dottorato di ricerca
Scuola di dottorato
Scienze e ingegneria dell'informazione
Ciclo
25
Coordinatore
Settore disciplinare
Settore concorsuale
Parole chiave
real-time; multiprocessor; scheduling; data structure; timekeeping; binary heap;
URN:NBN
DOI
10.6092/unibo/amsdottorato/5594
Data di discussione
19 Aprile 2013
URI

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