The Multi-Resource Server for predictable execution on multi-core platforms

In this paper we present an implementation and demonstration of the Multi-Resource Server (MRS) which enables predictable execution of real-time applications on multi-core platforms. The MRS provides temporal isolation both between tasks running on the same core, as well as, between tasks running on different cores. The latter could, without MRS, interfere with each other due to contention on a shared memory bus. We demonstrate that MRS can be used to “encapsulate” legacy systems and to give them enough resources to fulfill their purpose. In our case study a legacy media-player is integrated with several resource-hungry tasks running at a different core. We show that without MRS the media-player starts to drop frames due to the interference from other tasks; while introduction of MRS alleviates this problem. Another part of our demonstration shows how traditional periodic real-time tasks can be kept schedulable even when tasks with high memory-demand are added to the system.