Implementing Priority Inheritance Algorithms in an ADA Runtime System
April 1989 • Technical Report
Mark W. Borger, Ragunathan Rajkumar
This 1989 paper presents a high-level design for implementing the basic priority inheritance and priority ceiling protocols in an ADA runtime system.
Publisher:
Software Engineering Institute
CMU/SEI Report Number
CMU/SEI-89-TR-015
Subjects
Abstract
This paper presents a high-level design—in the form of necessary data structures, mechanisms, and algorithms—for implementing the basic priority inheritance and priority ceiling protocols in an ADA runtime system. Both of these protocols solve the unbounded priority inversion problem, where a high-priority task can be forced to wait for a lower priority task for an arbitrary duration of time. The protocols and their implementation also address the issues of non-deterministic selection of open alternatives and FIFO entry call queues. These protocols allow the timing analysis of a given set of ADA tasks in order to guarantee their deadlines in real-time systems. Importantly, it is possible to implement the protocols within the current semantics of the ADA language given the interpretations of ADA rules described by Goodenough and Sha in the Software Engineering Institute Technical Report 33 (1988). Strategies and possible alternatives are discussed for implementing these protocols in an ADA runtime system targeted to a uniprocessor execution environment.