Scheduling and Analysis of Parallel Real-Time Tasks with Semaphores

This paper for the first time studies the scheduling and analysis of parallel real-time tasks with semaphores. In parallel task systems, each task may issue multiple requests to a semaphore, which raises new challenges to the design and analysis problems. We propose a new locking protocol LPP that limits the maximal number of requests to a semaphore by a task that can block other tasks at any time. We develop analysis techniques to safely bound the task response times, with which we prove that the best real-time performance is achieved if only one request to a semaphore by a task is allowed to block other tasks at a time. Experiments under different parameter settings are conducted to compare our proposed protocol and analysis techniques with the state-of-the-art spinlock protocol and analysis techniques for parallel real-time tasks.