Hardware acceleration of deadlock avoidance and detection in real-time operating systems

Abstract

In a multitasking environment, resource management policies, being devised and utilized to ensure proper inter-process resource sharing, incur significant operational overhead due to their inherent complexity and often lead to performance penalties, which could be detrimental to the timing responses of critical systems. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate an approach to alleviate degraded system's timing performance by associating the underlying RTOS with a hardware accelerator to speed up resource management functions, more particularly those dealing with deadlock avoidance. Experimentally, the proposed solution for deadlock avoidance surpasses its software implementation with an acceleration gain of up to 98 %.