Hierarchical real-time scheduling in the multi-core era — An overview

With the accelerating pervasiveness of multi-core platforms in the embedded domains and the on-going need for more computational power and increased integration, multi-core scheduling for real-time and mixed-critical applications is an active research topic. In this paper, we give an overview on the history and the current state-of-the-art on multi-core real-time scheduling. A special focus is put on shared resource access protocols and hierarchical scheduling approaches, both of which are increasingly important due to the higher spatial integration and stronger coupling between the different subsystems, both on the application and on the multi-core architectural level. Moreover, hierarchical scheduling is a promising approach in the area of mixed-criticality systems to enable composability and segregation, which is needed to cope with the complexity of such systems. This survey will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of real-time scheduling for multi-core systems.