Design and Implementation of a Linux-based Message Processor to Minimize the Response-time Delay of Non-real-time Messages in Multi-core Environments

Sangho Wang, Younghun Park, Sungyong Park, Seungchun Kim, Cheolhoe Kim, Sangjun Kim, Cheol Jin

http://doi.org/

A message processor is server software that receives non-realtime messages as well as realtime messages from clients that need to be processed within a deadline. With the recent advances of micro-processor technologies and Linux, the message processor is often implemented in Linux-based multi-core servers and it is important to use cores efficiently to maximize the performance of system in multi-core environments. Numerous research efforts on a real-time scheduler for the efficient utilization of the multi-core environments have been conducted. Typically, though, they have been conducted theoretically or via simulation, making a subsequent real-system application difficult. Moreover, many Linux-based real-time schedulers can only be used in a specific Linux version, or the Linux source code needs to be modified. This paper presents the design of a Linux-based message processor for multi-core environments that maps the threads to the cores at user level. The message processor is implemented through a modification of the traditional RM algorithm that consolidates the real-time messages into certain cores using a first-fit-based bin-packing algorithm; this minimizes the response-time delay of the non-real-time messages, while guaranteeing the violation rate of the real-time messages. To compare the performances, the message processor was implemented using the two multi-core-scheduling algorithms GSN-EDF and P-FP, which are provided by the LITMUS framework. The benchmarking results show that the response-time delay of non-real-time messages in the proposed system was improved up to a maximum of 17% to 18%.