An experimental comparison of different real-time schedulers on multicore systems

Highlights? Experimental comparison among RM and EDF on multi-processors. ? Comparison made with partitioned, clustered and global policies. ? Random workloads of synthetic periodic tasks. ? Experimentation carried out on a 48-core machine with Linux. ? Overheads achieved in the various scenarios are reported. ? Global and clustered real-time algorithms prove to be a viable solution. In this work, an experimental comparison among the Rate Monotonic (RM) and Earliest Deadline First (EDF) multiprocessor real-time schedulers is performed, with a focus on soft real-time systems. We generated random workloads of synthetic periodic task sets and executed them on a big multi-core machine, using Linux as Operating System, gathering an extensive amount of data related to their exhibited performance under various real-time scheduling strategies. The comparison involves the fixed-priority scheduler for multiprocessors as available in the Linux kernel (with priorities set so as to achieve RM), and on our own implementation of EDF, both configured in global, partitioned and clustered mode. The impact of the various scheduling strategies on the performance of the applications, as well as the generated scheduling overheads, are compared presenting an extensive set of experimental results. These provide a comprehensive view of the performance achievable by the different schedulers under various workload conditions.