Support for hierarchical scheduling in FreeRTOS

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of a Hierarchical Scheduling Framework (HSF) on an open source real-time operating system (FreeRTOS) to support the temporal isolation between a number of applications, on a single processor. The goal is to achieve predictable integration and reusability of independently developed components or applications. We present the initial results of the HSF implementation by running it on an AVR 32-bit board EVK1100. The paper addresses the fixed-priority preemptive scheduling at both global and local scheduling levels. It describes the detailed design of HSF with the emphasis of doing minimal changes to the underlying FreeRTOS kernel and keeping its API intact. Finally it provides (and compares) the results for the performance measures of idling and deferrable servers with respect to the overhead of the implementation.