Feasibility analysis under fixed priority scheduling with limited preemptions

Preemptive scheduling often generates a significant runtime overhead that may increase task worst-case execution times up to 40%, with respect to a fully non-preemptive execution. In small embedded systems, such an extra cost results in longer and more variable response times that can significantly affect the overall energy consumption, as well as the system predictability. Limiting preemptions is often possible without jeopardizing schedulability. Although several authors addressed schedulability analysis under different forms of limited preemptive scheduling, current results exhibit two major deficiencies: (i) The maximum lengths of the non-preemptive regions for each task are still unknown under fixed priorities; (i) The exact response time analysis for tasks with fixed preemption points is too complex.This paper presents the schedulability analysis of real-time tasks with non-preemptive regions, under fixed priority assignments. In particular, two different preemption models are considered: the floating and the fixed preemption point model. Under each model, the feasibility analysis is addressed by deriving simple and effective schedulability tests, as well as an algorithm for computing the maximum length of the non-preemptive regions for each task. Finally, simulation experiments are presented to compare the two models in terms of schedulability.