Holistic WCRT Analysis for Global Fixed-Priority Preemptive Multiprocessor Scheduling

Many embedded applications demand both resource efficiency and timing guarantee. However, resource sharing naturally complicates the analysis that extracts the worst-case scenario out of contention. Global Fixed-Priority (GFP) preemptive multiprocessor scheduling is one of the mainstream strategies to resolve contention on computational resources. It allows jobs of the same task to be executed on different processors, hence potentially enabling better parallelism and more efficient resource utilization. Unfortunately, its worst-case response time (WCRT) analysis is challenging. Existing approaches divide a high-priority task into three workloads, namely, carry-in workload, body workload, and carry-out workload, trying to optimize them individually. In this work, we propose a holistic WCRT analysis for GFP preemptive multiprocessor scheduling, where a task is no longer divided. Specifically, (i) we establish the tight interference scenario for the task being analyzed to find the most interfering high-priority jobs in any time interval; (ii) we obtain the starting released instant of each high-priority task’s first job to determine the maximum interference from high-priority tasks’ first jobs to the task being analyzed; (iii) we build the worst-case tight interference scenario for the task being analyzed by combining the tight interference scenario and the starting released instants; (iv) we prove that the WCRT of the task being analyzed can be decided by the worst-case tight interference scenario. Evaluation on schedulability shows that our proposed analysis achieves 4.2%-8.6% higher acceptance ratio in randomly generated data sets than the state-of-the-art workload division approaches.