On the QNX IPC: Assessing Predictability for Local and Distributed Real-Time Systems

Abstract

With the advent of massively distributed applications such as those required by the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud compute continuum (i.e., automotive, smart agriculture, smart manufacturing, and more), real-time communication mechanisms allowing physically distributed nodes to seamlessly communicate as if they were running on the same host acquired noteworthy importance. To this end, the synchronous inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism provided by the QNX operating system (OS) is a promising candidate, as it allows using the application programming interface for communicating both on a single-and multi-node setting. Furthermore, it provides priority and partition inheritance mechanisms to improve predictability when working with the Adaptive Partitioning Scheduler (APS), a reservationbased scheduler provided by the QNX OS. This paper explores the behavior of the QNX synchronous message-passing (SyncMP) IPC with an extensive set of experiments, using them to formalize its behavior and model it from a real-time perspective. Then, it provides a response-time analysis for client-server applications based on the QNX SyncMP building upon self-suspending task theory. Finally, we evaluate the analysis on an application based on the WATERS 2019 Challenge by Bosch.