2026-07-21T23:46:40Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:26588 2026-07-02T09:39:08Z ddc:004 open_access

Boost-At-The-Tail: Work-Triggered Frequency Boosting for Fixed-Priority Scheduling Khodabandeloo, Behnam Huang, Chengzi Ekberg, Pontus Fixed Priority Scheduling Boost frequency Execution slack 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Behnam Khodabandeloo and Chengzi Huang and Pontus Ekberg 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 375, 38th European Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.4 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-265884 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.4 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode