Uniform scheduling of internal and external events under SRP-EDF

Abstract

With the growing complexity of modern embedded real-time systems, scheduling and managing of resources has become a daunting task. While scheduling and resource management for internal events can be simplified by adopting a commonplace real-time operating system (RTOS), scheduling and resource management for external events are left in the hands of the programmer, not to mention managing resources across the boundaries of external and internal events. In this paper we propose a unified system view incorporating earliest deadline first (EDF) for scheduling and stack resource policy (SRP) for resource management. From an embedded real-time system view, EDF+SRP is attractive not only because stack usage can be minimized, but also because the cost of a pre-emption becomes almost as cheap as a regular function call, and the number of preemptions is kept to a minimum. SRP+EDF also lifts the burden of manual resource management from the programmer and incorporates it into the scheduler. Furthermore, we show the efficiency of the SRP+EDF scheme, the intuitiveness of the programming model (in terms of reactive programming), and the simplicity of the implementation.