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Boost-At-The-Tail: Work-Triggered Frequency Boosting for Fixed-Priority Scheduling

Authors Behnam Khodabandeloo , Chengzi Huang , Pontus Ekberg

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Real-time systems
Keywords
  • Fixed Priority Scheduling
  • Boost frequency
  • Execution slack

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Abstract

Fixed-priority (FP) scheduling is widely used in safety-critical real-time systems due to its simplicity and analyzability, yet it may fail to schedule task sets whose worst-case response-time bounds exceed deadlines by small margins. Meanwhile, modern processors increasingly support short-term frequency boosting, providing additional processing capacity subject to thermal and power constraints. This paper introduces Boosted-FP, a fixed-priority scheduling framework that augments a given FP policy with controlled, limited frequency boosting. The key idea is to activate boosting based on the worst-case remaining execution demand of the currently executing job, thereby confining high-frequency execution to the tail of jobs. Per-task boost parameters are computed offline using standard fixed-priority response-time analysis under the chosen priority assignment, while boost activation decisions are made online using worst-case remaining-work information.
We show that Boosted-FP preserves hard real-time guarantees by relating its execution behavior to that of a task set with reduced execution times. Leveraging the sustainability of fixed-priority schedulability analysis with respect to execution-time reductions, we establish that any task set schedulable under the modified execution bounds is also schedulable under the proposed framework. We evaluate the framework under a global boost-budget constraint and show experimentally that boost usage remains bounded and often well below the offline provisioned budget. Together, these results demonstrate that controlled, work-triggered boosting can safely extend the schedulable region of fixed-priority scheduling without abandoning static priorities.

Cite As Get BibTex

Behnam Khodabandeloo, Chengzi Huang, and Pontus Ekberg. Boost-At-The-Tail: Work-Triggered Frequency Boosting for Fixed-Priority Scheduling. In 38th European Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 375, pp. 4:1-4:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.4

Author Details

Behnam Khodabandeloo
  • Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden
Chengzi Huang
  • Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden
Pontus Ekberg
  • Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive feedback, which significantly improved the presentation of this paper.

Supplementary Materials

References

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