Effective analysis for engineering real-time fixed priority schedulers

There has been considerable activity in recent years in developing analytical techniques for hard real-time systems. Inevitably these techniques make simplifying assumptions so as to reduce the complexity of the problem to be solved. Unfortunately this leads to a gap between theory and engineering practice. The paper presents new analysis that enables the costs of the scheduler (clock overheads, queue manipulations and release delays) to be factored into the standard equations for calculating worst-case response times. As well as predicting the true behavior of realistic systems, the analysis also allows free parameters, such as clock interrupt rate, to be determined