Schedulability Analysis of Mixed-Criticality Systems on Multiprocessors

The advent of multicore processors has attracted many safety-critical systems, e.g., automotive and avionics, to consider integrating multiple functionalities on a single, powerful computing platform. Such integration leads to host functionalities with different criticality levels on the same platform. The design of such "mixed-criticality" systems is often subject to certification from one or more certification authorities. Coming up with an effective scheduling policy and its analysis that can guarantee certification of the system at each criticality level, while maximizing the utilization of the processors, is the focus of the research presented in this paper. In this paper, the global, fixed-priority scheduling of a set of sporadic, mixed-criticality, tasks on multiprocessors is considered. A sufficient schedulability test based on response time analysis of the proposed algorithm is derived. One of the useful features of the proposed test is that it can be used for systems with more than two criticality levels. In addition, the test can be used to find "effective" fixed-priority ordering of the mixed-criticality tasks based on Audsley's approach.