EDZL Scheduling and Schedulability Analysis for Performance Asymmetric Multiprocessors

Abstract

Heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures allow embedded real-time systems to better match computing resources to each application's needs and dynamic workload requirements, thereby providing many opportunities for improved performance with reduced power consumption. Unfortunately, guaranteeing real-time requirements on heterogeneous multiprocessors remains a critical problem due to the lack of appropriate scheduling algorithms and analysis methods. In this paper, we consider EDZL (Earliest Deadline First until Zero-Laxity) for performance asymmetric multiprocessor scheduling. EDZL has been shown to outperform other scheduling policies such as global EDF on identical multiprocessors. We show that EDZL is still effective on performance asymmetric multi-processors, and present an efficient EDZL schedulability test. Experimental results show that EDZL scheduling is able to schedule up to 20% more task sets than global EDF and that our new EDZL schedulability test can accept up to 30% more schedulable task sets than a presently exiting one.