Schedulers in action

• Main Author: Gupta Anjali
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer systems organization::Performance of systems; DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Operating systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59082
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Real-time schedulers are widely used in many safety-critical applications such as avionics, automotive, industrial control, medical devices, etc. The primary purpose of these schedulers is to manage and prioritize access to limited platform resources such as processors and network. The consequences of different scheduling algorithms for such systems have to be properly understood. When developing a new scheduling algorithm or when trying to understand the functioning of an existing algorithm, monitoring and debugging for a distributed real-time system is very important. However, this is a complicated problem due to the lack of a set of advanced tools and adequate operating system capability. Software tools can cover the wide range of the software development life cycle from the requirement analysis phase to debugging and maintenance phases. This can be achieved by having visualization tools for real-time schedulers. However, visualization tools are severely lacking. As part of the author’s FYP Project, the author has worked on building a visualization tool for real-time schedulers. The front-end displays the process schedule on a timeline, along with all necessary annotations. The back-end comprises two main components: a generic interface for specification of real-time scheduling algorithm, and a generic interface for task/process generator. A tool which simulates scheduling processes and supports the research and development of new scheduling policies can be very useful. It may be used for educational purposes as simulation and visualization enhance the understanding of the consequences of scheduling decisions. It will also be useful for researchers in real-time systems to quickly validate or disprove their ideas and also to hypothesize properties of the algorithm through visualization.