A Hierarchical Hybrid Locking Protocol for Parallel Real-Time Tasks

Abstract

Parallel tasks have been paid growing attention in recent years, and the scheduling with shared resources is of significant importance to real-time systems. As an efficient mechanism to provide mutual exclusion for parallel processing, spin-locks are ubiquitous in multi-processor real-time systems. However, the spin-locks suffer the scalability problem, and the intra-task parallelism further exacerbates the analytical pessimism. To overcome such deficiencies, we propose a Hierarchical Hybrid Locking Protocol (H2LP) under federated scheduling. The proposed H2LP integrates the classical Multiprocessor Stack Resource Policy (MSRP) and uses a token mechanism to reduce global contentions. We provide a complete analysis framework supporting both heavy and light tasks under federated scheduling and develop a blocking analysis with the state-of-the-art linear optimization technique. Empirical evaluations showed that the H2LP outperformed the other state-of-the-art locking protocols in at least configurations when considering exclusive clustering. Furthermore, our partitioned approach for light tasks can substantially improve schedulability by mitigating the over-provisioning problem.