language: en

[To be presented at the 17th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, December 1996.]

A Framework for Implementing Objects and Scheduling Tasks in Lock-Free Real-Time Systems

James H. Anderson and Srikanth Ramamurthy
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract We present an integrated framework for developing real-time systems in which lock-free algorithms are employed to implement shared objects. There are two key objectives of our work. The first is to enable functionality for object sharing in lock-free real-time systems that is comparable to that in lock-based systems. Our main contribution toward this objective is an efficient approach for implementing multi-object lock-free operations and transactions. A second key objective of our work is to improve upon previously proposed scheduling conditions for tasks that share lock-free objects. When developing such conditions, the key issue is to bound the cost of operation interferences. We present a general approach for doing this, based on linear programming.

1. Introduction