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FFOB: efficient online mode-switch procrastination in mixed-criticality systems

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Abstract

In mixed-criticality scheduling, the widely adopted mode-switch scheme assumes that both high- and low-criticality tasks are schedulable when no tasks overrun (normal mode) and all high-criticality tasks are schedulable even when they overrun (critical mode, where low-criticality tasks are abandoned/degraded). However, this scheme greatly impedes the system performance because triggering a mode-switch immediately after any task overruns is abrupt and pessimistic. It is urgent to solve this problem as the mode-switch scheme is a fundamental part in the mixed-criticality scheduling. In this article, we present an on-the-fly fast overrun budgeting mechanism for both, earliest-deadline-first scheduled and fixed-priority scheduled systems that can effectively keep the system “away” from the critical mode. Our main idea is to perform overrun budgeting for all tasks as a whole, by monitoring task executions and updating a common overrun budget. This way, the overrun budget is shared among all tasks and adaptively replenished by leveraging run-time information; consequently, mode-switch can be postponed as much as possible. Both, extensive simulations and real-life deployments demonstrate that our proposed mode-switch scheme is lightweight and significantly outperforms existing solutions in improving the system’s quality of service for low-criticality tasks.

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Notes

  1. \(T^h\) is the hyper-period.

  2. The complexity of twice binary searching is the same as one time binary searching, i.e., \(O(log\,(T^h)^2) = O(2log\,T^h)=O(log\,T^h)\)

  3. \(t_{v1}^s\) may not be equal to \(t_{C_i}\) in reality, but it does not change the proof later on.

  4. LO mode deadline is smaller than the original deadline

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61802013 and 61872393, in part by the Talent Foundation of Beijing University of Chemical University under Grant buctrc201811, in part by the Open Research Project of the State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries under Grant H2018294, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant XK1802-4.

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Hu, B., Thiele, L., Huang, P. et al. FFOB: efficient online mode-switch procrastination in mixed-criticality systems. Real-Time Syst 55, 471–513 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-018-9323-x

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