Using Lock Servers to Scale Real-Time Locking Protocols: Chasing Ever-Increasing Core Counts

During the past decade, parallelism-related issues have been at the forefront of real-time systems research due to the advent of multicore technologies. In the coming years, such issues will loom ever larger due to increasing core counts. Having more cores means a greater potential exists for platform capacity loss when the available parallelism cannot be fully exploited. In this paper, such capacity loss is considered in the context of real-time locking protocols. In this context, lock nesting becomes a key concern as it can result in transitive blocking chains that force tasks to execute sequentially unnecessarily. Such chains can be quite long on a larger machine. Contention-sensitive real-time locking protocols have been proposed as a means of “breaking” transitive blocking chains, but such protocols tend to have high overhead due to more complicated lock/unlock logic. To ease such overhead, the usage of lock servers is considered herein. In particular, four specific lock-server paradigms are proposed and many nuances concerning their deployment are explored. Experiments are presented that show that, by executing cache hot, lock servers can enable reductions in lock/unlock overhead of up to 86%. Such reductions make contention-sensitive protocols a viable approach in practice. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Computer systems organization → Real-time systems, Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyber-physical systems, Software and its engineering → Mutual exclusion, Software and its engineering → Real-time systems software, Software and its engineering → Synchronization, Software and its engineering → Process synchronization