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Critical-Section Granularity for Multi-Resource Systems with Nested Critical Sections

Authors Catherine E. Nemitz , Tanya Amert , Jonad Pulaj

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LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.1.pdf
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  • 24 pages

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Real-time systems
  • Software and its engineering → Mutual exclusion
  • Software and its engineering → Synchronization
Keywords
  • Real-time systems
  • shared resources
  • fixed-priority scheduling
  • schedulability

Metrics

Abstract

Typical models of resource-sharing real-time tasks provide the worst-case task execution time and the duration of each critical section during which a resource is accessed. Such models abstract away the detailed behavior of a task, which may make several individual accesses within a single critical section, incurring access overhead once for the entire critical section. Considering a more fine-grained model with individual access and non-access segments at the forefront gives more control in the system design process; choosing how accesses are grouped into critical sections enables balancing trade-offs between overhead and blocking based on other system parameters, including task deadlines. This paper presents an optimal approach for multi-resource systems that allow any given task to use up to two resources, including support for nested critical sections. This is achieved by extending analysis to multiple resources and constructing a Quadratically-Constrained Integer Program to determine critical sections. This approach is compared to heuristics on the basis of schedulability and its runtime is explored. Further extension to support more resources per task is discussed.

Cite As Get BibTex

Catherine E. Nemitz, Tanya Amert, and Jonad Pulaj. Critical-Section Granularity for Multi-Resource Systems with Nested Critical Sections. In 38th European Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 375, pp. 1:1-1:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.1

Author Details

Catherine E. Nemitz
  • Davidson College, NC, USA
Tanya Amert
  • Carleton College, NC, USA
Jonad Pulaj
  • Davidson College NC, USA

References

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