Hard Real-Time scheduling on a multicore platform

Abstract

Multicore microcontrollers are rapidly penetrating the real-time systems market with a promise of increased processing throughput and lower energy consumption compared to traditional single-core processors. Consequently, it sparked a wave of research in Soft Real-Time (SRT) scheduling algorithms for multicore processors producing many different scheduling algorithms that are good at harnessing the added power of the multicore processors but lack the required determinism to be used in Hard Real-Time (HRT) systems.We present the Multicore Priority Ceiling Protocol scheduling algorithm for HRT systems along with its schedulability test for HRT systems running on a single instance of a modified RTOS. We also developed a tool that uses our schedulability test to solve the task partitioning problem using a Particle Swarm Optimization.