Schedulability Analysis for Global Fixed-Priority Scheduling of the 3-Phase Task Model

Scheduling real-time applications on general purpose multicore platforms is a challenging problem from a timing analysis perspective. Such platforms expose uncontrolled sources of interference whenever concurrent accesses to memory are performed. The non-deterministic bus and memory access behavior complicates the estimations of applications' worst-case execution times (WCET). The 3-phase task model seems a good candidate to circumvent the uncontrolled sources of interference by isolating concurrent memory accesses. A task is divided in three successive phases; first, the task loads its instruction and data in a local memory, then it executes non-preemptively using those pre-loaded instructions and data, and finally, the modified data are pushed back to main memory. Following this execution model, tasks never access the bus during their execution phase. Instead, all the bus accesses are performed during the first and third phases. In this paper, we focus on the global fixed-priority scheduling of the 3-phase task model. A new schedulability test is derived by modelling the interference happening on the bus rather than the interference on the cores as in the state-ot-the-art techniques. The effectiveness of the test is evaluated by comparing it against the state-of-the-art.