Analysis and Implementation of Global Preemptive Fixed-Priority Scheduling with Dynamic Cache Allocation

Abstract

We introduce gFPca, a cache-aware global pre-emptive fixed-priority (FP) scheduling algorithm with dynamic cache allocation for multicore systems, and we present its analysis and implementation. We introduce a new overhead-aware analysis that integrates several novel ideas to safely and tightly account for the cache overhead. Our evaluation shows that the proposed overhead-accounting approach is highly accurate, and that gFPca improves the schedulability of cache-intensive tasksets substantially compared to the cache-agnostic global FP algorithm. Our evaluation also shows that gFPca outperforms the existing cache-aware non- preemptive global FP algorithm in most cases. Through our implementation and empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the feasibility of cache-aware global scheduling with dynamic cache allocation and highlight scenarios in which gFPca is especially useful in practice.