Enhancing the real-time capabilities of the Linux Kernel

Sousa, Paulo Baltarejo; Pereira, Nuno; Tovar, Eduardo

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/3712

Use this identifier to reference this record.

Name:	Description:	Size:	Format:
ART_PauloSousa_2012_CISTER.pdf		601.18 KB	Adobe PDF	Download

Send Feedback

Authors

Sousa, Paulo Baltarejo

Pereira, Nuno

Tovar, Eduardo

Abstract(s)

The mainline Linux Kernel is not designed forhard real-time systems; it only fits the requirements of soft realtimesystems. In recent years, a kernel developer communityhas been working on the PREEMPT-RT patch. This patch(that aims to get a fully preemptible kernel) adds some realtimecapabilities to the Linux kernel. However, in terms ofscheduling policies, the real-time scheduling class of Linux islimited to the First-In-First-Out (SCHED_FIFO) and Round-Robin (SCHED_RR) scheduling policies. These scheduling policiesare however quite limited in terms of realtime performance.Therefore, in this paper, we report one importantcontribution for adding more advanced real-time capabilitiesto the Linux Kernel. Specifically, we describe modificationsto the (PREEMPT-RT patched) Linux kernel to supportreal-time slot-based task-splitting scheduling algorithms. Ourpreliminary evaluation shows that our implementation exhibitsa real-time performance that is superior to the schedulingpolicies provided by the current version of PREMPT-RT. Thisis a significant add-on to a widely adopted operating system.