Framework for validation, test and analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms and scheduler implementations

This paper describes our work towards a rapid prototyping system for hard real-time systems focusing on scheduling algorithms and scheduler implementations. The framework aims at speeding up the decision making process during selection of a suitable scheduling algorithm for a real-time application. The framework supports various kinds of real-time scheduling algorithms, which can be simulated for evaluation purposes. Furthermore, implementations of these algorithms can be tested in a real-time operating system (RTOS) with real or synthetic workloads. The algorithms are implemented as software routines, which are part of the operating system (OS), or realized within a coprocessor to free the operating system kernel from time consuming scheduling operations. Both kinds of implementations have to provide an application programming interface that hides the algorithm from implementation issues. The target operating system of our framework is mainly RT-Linux, even though development for those systems is possible under Linux as well as Windows-NT. The framework proposed in this paper is new in that it supports the selection of the right algorithm and the right implementation for the target platform based on real-time scheduling analysis.