Combining -Hard deadlines and Dual Priority Scheduling

The problem of effectively scheduling soft tasks whilst guaranteeing the behaviour of hard tasks has been addressed in many papers and a large number of techniques have been proposed. The dual priority mechanism is an intuitively simple method with low overheads. A hard task is assigned two priorities. Upon invocation, the task starts executing with a low priority and it is promoted to a high priority at a time that will guarantee that its deadline is met. Soft tasks are assigned medium priorities; they can thus preempt any hard task that is executing before its promotion time. To increase the capacity for soft tasks, and therefore the effectiveness of the real-time system, hard tasks may be assigned a ( 2) -hard (read n in m) temporal constraint. This implies that the task must meet n deadlines in any m invocations. This paper addresses the combination of such constraints and dual priority scheduling, This approach reduces the gap between dynamic prioriiy and $xed priority scheduling with the goal of reducing the average response time of soft tasks.