Dispatching Domains for Multiprocessor Platforms and Their Representation in Ada

Multiprocessor platforms are becoming the norm for more powerful embedded real-time systems. Although Ada allows its programs to be executed on such platforms it provides no explicit support. If Ada is going to be an effective language for multiprocessor real-time systems then it needs to address the mapping issue that will allow the programmer to express their requirements for task to processor affinity. A number of different mapping and scheduling approaches are advocated in the scheduling literature. The primitives in the language should allow these schemes to be directly supported. In this paper we propose extensions to Ada 2005 to introduce the notion of dispatching domains, and we show how these can be used to implement two example multiprocessor scheduling approaches.