Slite: OS Support for Near Zero-Cost, Configurable Scheduling

Despite over 35 years of wildly changing requirements and applications, real-time systems have treated the kernel implementation of system scheduling policy as given. New time management policies are either adapted to the kernel, and rarely adopted, or emulated in user-level under the restriction th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gadepalli, Phani Kishore, Pan, Runyu, Parmer, Gabriel
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Instruction sets
Parallel processing
Processor scheduling
Real-time systems
Runtime
Synchronization
Systems support
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Summary:Despite over 35 years of wildly changing requirements and applications, real-time systems have treated the kernel implementation of system scheduling policy as given. New time management policies are either adapted to the kernel, and rarely adopted, or emulated in user-level under the restriction that they must stay within the confines of the underlying system's mechanisms. This not only hinders the agility of the system to adapt to new requirements, but also harms non-functional properties of the system such as the effective use of parallelism, and the application of isolation to promote security. This paper introduces Slite, a system designed to investigate the possibilities of near zero-cost scheduling of system-level threads at user-level. This system efficiently and predictably enables the user-level implementation of configurable scheduling policies. This capability has wide-ranging impact, and we investigate how it can increase the isolation, thus dependability, of a user-level real-time OS, and how it can provide a real-time parallel runtime with better analytical properties using thread-based - rather than the conventional task-based - scheduling. We believe these benefits motivate a strong reconsideration of the fundamental scheduling structure in future real-time systems.
ISSN:2642-7346
DOI:10.1109/RTAS48715.2020.000-9