Work-in-Progress: Real-Time Scheduling of Parallel Applications with Gang Scheduling

Future embedded systems demand increasingly more computation performance, which can only be provided by exploiting parallelism in real-time applications. Due to scheduling and scalability issues, parallelism still is an open issue especially in hard real-time systems. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe and discuss a hierarchical gang-scheduling based approach to address the scalability issue. We use gang scheduling to schedule tasks consisting of multiple kernel level threads. The execution budget provided by the kernel level threads is used for scheduling of user level threads using a lightweight threading library running in user space. Further, the first steps towards an implementation in the realtime operating system kernel Erika OS are described and possible benefits and risks of this approach are shown.