Scheduling Suspendable, Pipelined Tasks with Non-Preemptive Sections in Soft Real-Time Multiprocessor Systems

While most prior work on multiprocessor real-time scheduling focuses on independent tasks, dependencies due to non-preemptive sections, suspensions, and pipeline-based precedence constraints are common in practice. In this paper, such complexities are considered in the context of the global earliest-deadline-first scheduling algorithm. It is shown that any periodic task system with such dependencies can be transformed into one with only suspensions in a way that preserves maximum per-task response times. This result enables analysis directed at systems with suspensions to be applied if non-preemptive sections and/or pipelines are present as well.