A priority mutex with bounded waiting for interactive consumer electronics systems

摘要

In most operating systems for interactive consumer electronics devices, inter-process communication (IPC) primitives use mutex locks to maintain consistency against concurrent accesses. However, using a real-time mutex (rt_mutex) in the IPC component can cause indefinitely long starvation of low priority processes. Because such starvation is not suitable for soft real-time systems, we propose a novel mutex mechanism that prioritizes the high priority processes while guaranteeing the bounded waiting of low-priority processes. Our evaluation showed that the waiting time of the low priority processes for IPC was restricted up to 68 ms while the response time of the high priority process was similar to rt-mutex's (13 ms).