Real-time resource-sharing under clustered scheduling: mutex, reader-writer, and k-exclusion locks

This paper presents the first suspension-based real-time locking protocols for clustered schedulers. Such schedulers pose challenges from a locking perspective because they exhibit aspects of both partitioned and global scheduling, which seem to necessitate fundamentally different means for bounding priority inversions. A new mechanism to bound such inversions, termed priority donation, is presented and used to derive protocols for mutual exclusion, reader-writer exclusion, and k-exclusion. Each protocol has asymptotically optimal blocking bounds under certain analysis assumptions. The latter two protocols are also the first of their kind for the special cases of global and partitioned scheduling.