Resource Synchronization and Preemption Thresholds Within Mixed-Criticality Scheduling

Abstract

In a mixed-criticality system, multiple tasks with different levels of criticality may coexist on the same hardware platform. The scheduling algorithm EDF-VD (Earliest Deadline First with Virtual Deadlines) has been proposed for mixed-criticality systems, which assumes tasks do not share any common resources. We present MC-SRP (Mixed-Criticality Stack Resource Policy), a resource synchronization protocol for EDF-VD, which allows resource sharing among tasks at the same criticality level and guarantees that each task is blocked at most once in each criticality mode. In addition, we present MC-SRPT (MC-SRP with Thresholds) for reducing the application stack size requirement in resource-constrained embedded systems.