Mapping real-time to POSIX: A simplistic approach for the availability of real-time scheduling for off the shelf embedded platforms

Researchers in the real-time community have accumulated an enormous theoretical background on scheduling policies and respective assessment criteria. Lots of surveys and textbooks are available which classify the varying approaches. In contrast to this abundance of policies and strategies the availability of real-time scheduling for given platforms is rather low. Still more frustrating is the lack of easily manageable tools for prototypical test and use of a given platform. This paper presents an easy-to-use platform-independent implementation of rate monotonic scheduling policies - in this paper exemplary for (RMS) - based on the POSIX standard. Hence the only platform requirement is to provide the used POSIX functions. Although many POSIX API-providers claim to be POSIX compliant or POSIX conform but not POSIX certified there is still no guarantee that the required POSIX subset works as expected. A test on conformity of a platform by a stepwise organized and self-documenting test suite is proposed in this paper.