Scheduling Mixed-criticality Systems on Reconfigurable Platforms

The scheduling for mixed criticality systems, where multiple functionalities with different criticality levels are integrated into a shared hardware platform, is an important research area. Reconfigurable platforms, which combine the advantages of software flexibility and performance efficiencies, are recognized as a suitable processing platform for real-time embedded systems. In this paper, we consider the scheduling of mixed criticality systems with two criticality levels on reconfigurable platforms. Partitioned fixed-priority preemptive scheduling is used to schedule tasks. Since the context switch overhead in reconfigurable platforms is not as small as that of multiprocessors, it has been taken into account in our schedulability analysis. Furthermore, a context-switch-aware partitioning algorithm is presented to improve the schedulability of tasks in platforms that context switch cost cannot be neglected. The experiments results show that our proposed partitioning algorithm gives higher schedulability ratios when compared to the classical partitioning algorithms.