Combining Hard Periodic and Soft Aperiodic Real-Time Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Compute Resources

Effectively scheduling tasks on heterogeneous resources is critical to maximizing the overall benefit of those resources in system-on-a-chip architectures. In this paper we focus on scheduling soft a periodic tasks alongside periodic tasks with hard deadline constraints on heterogeneous real-time systems. We introduce a method to improve a periodic task responsiveness without breaking periodic task deadline guarantees, by first scheduling periodic tasks offline, then dynamically scheduling a periodic tasks in the remaining resource slack time. Experimental results indicate that the quality of a periodic task scheduling depends highly on the slack distribution within and across resources after periodic task scheduling, and on the flexibility of the a periodic task scheduler to rearrange these compute slacks to accommodate incoming a periodic tasks.