Work-in-Progress: Migration Hints in Real-Time Operating Systems

Abstract

Task migration is a potent instrument to exploit multi-core processors. Like full preemption, full migration is particularly advantageous as it allows the scheduler to relocate tasks at arbitrary times between cores. However, in hard real-time systems, migration is accompanied by a tremendous drawback: poor predictability and thus inevitable overapproximations in the worst-case execution-time analysis. This is due to the non-constant size of the tasks' resident set and the costs associated with its transfer between cores. As a result, migration is banned in many real-time systems, regressing the developer to a static allocation of tasks to cores with disadvantageous effects on the overall utilization and schedulability. In previous work, we successfully alleviated the shortcomings of full migration in real-time systems by reducing the associated costs and increasing its predictability. By employing static analysis, we were able to identify beneficial migration points and thus generate static schedules migrating tasks at these identified points. In ongoing work, we extend this approach to dynamic scheduling by providing information about advantageous migration points to an operating system which then makes migration decisions at runtime.