An implementation of the earliest deadline first algorithm in Linux

Abstract

Recently, many projects have been started to introduce some real-time mechanisms into general purpose operating systems (GPOS) in order to make them capable of providing the users with some temporal guarantees. Many of these projects focused especially on Linux for its capillary and widespread adoption throughout many different research and industrial environments. By tracking the kernel release cycle, we propose an efficient Earliest Deadline First implementation in the form of a patch-set against the 2.6.27 version, that is the latest released one, as of now. Our implementation provides the user with the possibility to choose SCHED EDF as one of the possible scheduling policies for a task, with an enhanced version of the standard algorithm. In fact, we propose a new approach to shared resources ’ access which, differently from many other previous existing works, does not require the user to specify any parameters about the critical sections every task will enter during its execution.