An Experimental Investigation of the Potential of BLF-driven Scheduling of Real-time Threads

Resource allocation in complex real-time computer systems (RTCS’s) cannot be adequately handled by straightforward extensions of the CPU and peripheral device scheduling techniques used in non-RTCS’s. Rather, all the resources including CPU’s, peripheral devices, communication channels, etc. should be handled in an integrated manner. As an idealistic framework, we laid out a globally optimal resource allocation methodology based on the benefit loss function (BLF), which includes both static resource allocation and design of dynamic resource allocation algorithms. As a small experimental part of this research, we also designed and implemented a BLF-driven thread scheduler (CPU scheduler) on Solaris 2.3. This experiment showed that existing processor scheduling approaches were not competitive against a quickly developed BLF-driven scheduling approach with respect to minimizing the total benefit loss. Therefore, the BLF-driven resource allocation approach opens doors for many new worthwhile research efforts.