Virtual Gang based Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks on Multicore Platforms

Abstract: We propose a virtual-gang based parallel real-time task scheduling approach for multicore platforms. Our approach is based on the notion of a virtual-gang, which is a group of parallel real-time tasks that are statically linked and scheduled together by a gang scheduler. We present a light-weight intra-gang synchronization framework, called RTG-Sync, and virtual gang formation algorithms that provide strong temporal isolation and high real-time schedulability in scheduling real-time tasks on multicore. We evaluate our approach both analytically, with generated tasksets against state-of-the-art approaches, and empirically with a case-study involving real-world workloads on a real embedded multicore platform. The results show that our approach provides simple but powerful compositional analysis framework, achieves better analytic schedulability, especially when the effect of interference is considered, and is a practical solution for COTS multicore platforms.