Resource sharing using the rollback mechanism in hierarchically scheduled real-time open systems

Abstract

In this paper we present a new synchronization protocol called RRP (Rollback Resource Policy) which is compatible with hierarchically scheduled open systems and specialized for resources that can be aborted and rolled back. We conduct an extensive event-based simulation and compare RRP against all equivalent existing protocols in hierarchical fixed priority preemptive scheduling; SIRAP (Subsystem Integration and Resource Allocation Policy), OPEN-HSRPnP (open systems version of Hierarchical Stack Resource Policy no Payback) and OPEN-HSRPwP (open systems version of Hierarchical Stack Resource Policy with Payback). Our simulation study shows that RRP has better average-case response-times than the state-of-the-art protocol in open systems, i.e., SIRAP, and that it performs better than OPEN-HSRPnP/OPEN-HSRPwP in terms of schedulability of randomly generated systems. The simulations consider both resources that are compatible with rollback as well as resources incompatible with rollback (only abort), such that the resource-rollback overhead can be evaluated. We also measure CPU overhead costs (in VxWorks) related to the rollback mechanism of tasks and resources. We use the eXtremeDB (embedded real-time) database to measure the resource-rollback overhead ¹ .