An Empirical Investigation of Eager and Lazy Preemption Approaches in Global Limited Preemptive Scheduling

Global limited preemptive real-time scheduling in multiprocessor systems using Fixed Preemption Points (FPP) brings in an additional challenge with respect to the choice of the task to be preempted in order to maximize schedulability. Two principal choices with respect to the preemption approach exist 1) the scheduler waits for the lowest priority job to become preemptible, 2) the scheduler preempts the first job, among the lower priority ones, that becomes preemptible. We refer to the former as the Lazy Preemption Approach (LPA) and the latter as the Eager Preemption Approach (EPA). Each of these choice has a different effect on the actual number of preemptions in the schedule, that in turn determine the runtime overheads. In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of the run-time preemptive behavior of Global Preemptive Scheduling and Global Limited Preemptive Scheduling with EPA and LPA, under both Earliest Deadline First (EDF) and Fixed Priority Scheduling (FPS) paradigms. Our experiments reveal interesting observations some of which are counter-intuitive. We then analyse the counter-intuitive observations and identify the associated reasons. The observations presented facilitate the choice of appropriate strategies when using limited preemptive schedulers on multiprocessor systems.