Multicore Mixed-Criticality Systems: Partitioned Scheduling and Utilization Bound

In mixed-criticality (MC) systems, multiple activities with various certification requirements (thus with different criticality levels) can co-exist on shared hardware platforms, where multicore processors have emerged as the de facto computing engines. In this paper, by using the partitioned earliest-deadline-first with virtual deadlines (EDF-VDs) scheduler for a set of periodic MC tasks running on multicore systems, we derive a criticality-aware utilization bound for efficient feasibility tests and then identify its characteristics. Our analysis shows that the bound increases with increasing number of cores and decreasing system criticality level. We show that, since the utilizations of MC tasks at different criticality levels can vary considerably, the utilization contribution of a task on different cores may have large variations and thus can significantly affect the system schedulability under the EDF-VD scheduler. Based on these observations, we propose a novel and efficient criticality-aware task partitioning algorithm (CA-TPA) to compensate for the inherent pessimism of the utilization bound. In order to improve the system schedulability, the task priorities are determined according to their utilization contributions to the system in CA-TPA. Moreover, by analyzing the utilization variations of tasks at different levels, we develop several heuristics to minimize the utilization increment and balance the workload on cores. The simulation results show that the CA-TPA scheme is very effective in achieving higher schedulability ratio and yielding balanced workloads. The actual implementation in Linux operating system further demonstrates the applicability of CA-TPA with lower run-time overhead, compared to the existing partitioning schemes.