Hard Real-Time Computing Systems

Rating:
Summary: Provides practical hard RT techniques based on theory.
Review: Highly recommended. This is the book that I loan to software engineers, computer science new grads (and sometimes not so new grads), that don't understand what hard real-time is, don't understand that it matters, and most importantly, don't understand that real-time performance can be predicted by the appropriate choice of a scheduling policy. By understanding the concepts in this book, the real-time system architect is provided a variety of techniques that can be used to design a system whose timing performance can be analyzed, predicted and guaranteed by proof.

The author presents algorithms to implement aperiodic and periodic task scheduling, fixed- and dynamic-priority servers, resource access policies. He gives practical examples of their application, discusses their drawbacks, and compares them as a function of performance, complexity, memory requirements, etc.. In general the author presents an algorithm by first giving a practical explanation of how the algorithm works, follows this with a schedulability analysis and guarantee of schedulability. Theorems with proofs are introduced as necessary when they are needed as part of the analysis. This is a practical book whose content is based on theoretical foundations. Published references for all algorithms are provided.