Scheduling fixed-priority tasks with preemption threshold

Abstract

In the context of fixed-priority scheduling, feasibility of a task set with non-preemptive scheduling does not imply the feasibility with preemptive scheduling and vice versa. We use the notion of preemption threshold, first introduced by Express Logic, in their ThreadX real-time operating system, to develop a scheduling model that subsumes both preemptive and non-preemptive fixed priority scheduling. Preemption threshold allows a task to only disable preemption of tasks up to a specified threshold priority. Tasks having priorities higher than the threshold are still allowed to preempt. With this new scheduling model, we show that schedulability is improved as compared to both the preemptive and nonpreemptive scheduling models. We develop the equations for computing the worst-case response times, using the concept of level-i busy period. Some useful results about the generalized model are presented and an algorithm for optimal assignment of priority and preemption threshold is designed based on these results.