Early-release fair scheduling

Presents a variant of Pfair scheduling (S. Baruah et al., 1995, 1996), which we call early-release fair (ERfair) scheduling. Like conventional Pfair scheduling, ERfair scheduling algorithms can be applied to optimally schedule periodic tasks on a multiprocessor system in polynomial time. However, ERfair scheduling differs from Pfair scheduling in that it is work-conserving. As a result, average job response times may be much lower under ERfair scheduling than under Pfair scheduling, particularly in lightly loaded systems. In addition, run-time costs are lower under ERfair scheduling.