A Novel Hard-Soft Processor Affinity Scheduling for Multicore Architecture using Multiagents

Multicore architecture otherwise called as SoC consists of large number of processors packed together on a single chip uses hyper threading technology. This increase in processor core brings new advancements in simultaneous and parallel computing. Apart from enormous performance enhancement, this multicore platform adds lot of challenges to the critical task execution on the processor cores, which is a crucial part from the operating system scheduling point of view. In this paper we combine the AMAS theory of multiagent system with the affinity based processor scheduling and this will be best suited for critical task execution on multicore platforms. This hard-soft processor affinity scheduling algorithm promises in minimizing the average waiting time of the non critical tasks in the centralized queue and avoids the context switching of critical tasks. That is we assign hard affinity for critical tasks and soft affinity for non critical tasks. The algorithm is applicable for the system that consists of both critical and non critical tasks in the ready queue. We actually modified and simulated the linux 2.6.11 kernel process scheduler to incorporate this scheduling concept. Our result shows the maximum cpu utilization for the non critical tasks and high throughput for the critical tasks.