TY - JOUR T1 - Software-Level GPU Preemption via OpenCL Kernel Scheduling in User Space AU - Lee, Namcheol AU - Park, Geonha AU - Seo, Woobean AU - Hong, Seongsoo JO - Journal of KIISE, JOK PY - 2025 DA - 2025/1/14 DO - 10.5626/JOK.2025.52.9.727 KW - GPU preemption KW - GPU kernel KW - OpenCL KW - user-space AB - As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in modern embedded systems, ensuring real-time performance for deep neural network (DNN) inference using GPUs has become a critical challenge. However, since the GPU is a shared resource with high preemption costs, process-level preemption is not effectively supported. As a result, priority inversion occurs during resource contention among processes, complicating the implementation of real-time multitasking in embedded systems utilizing GPUs. Previous studies have explored hardware-dependent approaches to GPU preemption, but these methods often lack portability and scalability. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a software-level GPU preemption technique that enables preemption without relying on hardware-specific mechanisms. The proposed method intercepts GPU kernel execution requests from processes and forwards them to a user-space OpenCL kernel scheduler, which controls the execution order of GPU kernels based on process priorities. This approach reduces delays for high-priority processes caused by lower-priority ones. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method achieves high execution determinism.