Replica-Request Priority Donation: A Real-Time Progress Mechanism for Global Locking Protocols

Real-time locking protocols employ progress mechanism(s) to ensure that resource-holding jobs are scheduled. These mechanisms are required to bound the duration of priority-inversion blocking (pi-blocking) for jobs sharing resources. Examples of such progress mechanisms include priority inheritance and priority donation. Unfortunately, some progress mechanisms can cause any job, including those that never request shared resources, to be blocked upon job release. This paper presents a variant of priority donation for globally-scheduled systems that only causes blocking for jobs waiting for shared resources. Additionally, this variant of priority donation is employed to construct a new suspension-based locking protocol called the replica-request donation global locking protocol (R²DGLP), which is asymptotically optimal for both mutex and k-exclusion (i.e., multi-unit) resources. This work is motivated by multicore systems where tasks may share I/O devices (e.g., GPUs) where critical sections can be long. In such applications, progress mechanisms that cause jobs that do not access I/O devices to be blocked to ensure progress can be detrimental from a schedulability perspective.