A paper submitted by TTTech Labs researchers Paraskevas Karachatzis, Jan Ruh, and Silviu S. Craciunas has been accepted at the 31st International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS). It will bring together experts from industry and academia to present and discuss novel ideas and research results in different areas of real-time and embedded systems. The conference, which is a central forum for research and exchange on this complex subject matter, will take place June 7 to 8, 2023, in Dortmund, Germany
The new findings presented in the TTTech Labs paper may harbor promising benefits, such as substantial cost reductions in multiple industries, including automotive, and industrial IoT. The results may also help improve TTTech’s products in these sectors.
The paper: “Time-triggered Scheduling in the Linux Kernel”
Titled, “An Evaluation of Time-triggered Scheduling in the Linux Kernel” the paper studies the benefits of extending the hierarchy of Linux kernel scheduling mechanisms with a time-triggered scheduler. Time-triggered scheduling offers numerous benefits for critical systems, such as temporal isolation, determinism, and compositionality. These advantages are especially important in modern real-time systems, including those in the automotive industry, where supporting non-trivial jitter requirements and multi-rate dependency chains for ADAS/AD functions using classical scheduling approaches can be challenging. In addition, GNU/Linux has become a popular choice for soft real-time applications in industries such as automotive, industrial control, and the Internet of Things (IoT), due to the introduction of mixed-criticality workloads, potential cost reduction through commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) usage, open-source licensing models, extensive library support, and well-established programming environments. As a result, there has been increasing interest in academia and industry to understand and enhance the real-time capabilities of the Linux kernel via, e.g., PREEMPT_RT and the EDF-based kernel scheduler.
In the paper, the TTTech Labs researchers propose, implement, and evaluate an open-source, kernel-level time-triggered scheduling approach for Linux, examining the level of determinism achievable in terms of task execution and end-to-end latencies. The results show that time-triggered scheduling in the Linux kernel achieves reduced latency and jitter for real-time applications when compared to the existing scheduling policies and user-space time-triggered implementations.
Read the authors' preprint version here © ACM
TTTech Labs is the in-house research department of TTTech Group, researching the design of dependable and secure real-time systems. The research conducted by TTTech Labs is highly respected in the scientific community and frequently receives formal recognition: At RTNS 2022, a paper co-authored by TTTech Labs Corporate Scientist Silviu Craciunas was selected as one of the conference’s three outstanding papers.
The research work presented in the paper has been supported by European Union’s Horizon Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement number 101076754, Project AITHENA.
