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Rate Monotonic Manager Relaxation of Assumptions

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19.2.4.6: Relaxation of Assumptions

The assumptions used to develop the RMS schedulability rules are uncommon in most real-time systems. For example, it was assumed that tasks have constant unvarying execution time. It is possible to relax this assumption, simply by using the worst-case execution time of each task.

Another assumption is that the tasks are independent. This means that the tasks do not wait for one another or contend for resources. This assumption can be relaxed by accounting for the amount of time a task spends waiting to acquire resources. Similarly, each task's execution time must account for any I/O performed and any RTEMS directive calls.

In addition, the assumptions did not account for the time spent executing interrupt service routines. This can be accounted for by including all the processor utilization by interrupt service routines in the utilization calculation. Similarly, one should also account for the impact of delays in accessing local memory caused by direct memory access and other processors accessing local dual-ported memory.

The assumption that nonperiodic tasks are used only for initialization or failure-recovery can be relaxed by placing all periodic tasks in the critical task set. This task set can be scheduled and analyzed using RMS. All nonperiodic tasks are placed in the non-critical task set. Although the critical task set can be guaranteed to execute even under transient overload, the non-critical task set is not guaranteed to execute.

In conclusion, the application designer must be fully cognizant of the system and its run-time behavior when performing schedulability analysis for a system using RMS. Every hardware and software factor which impacts the execution time of each task must be accounted for in the schedulability analysis.


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