A DOMAIN SPECIFIC LANGUAGE BASED APPROACH FOR DESIGN OF OS SCHEDULERS

Abstract

Over the years, OS developers and researchers have been continuously implementing new scheduling policies to address the requirements of different classes of applications. Such schedulers are especially designed to ensure timing guarantees that traditional schedulers are unable to provide. However, writing schedulers is a difficult task. It requires understanding the operation of multiple low-level kernel mechanisms. To complicate matters, schedulers are highly optimized components. Such optimizations hinder code maintenance and testing, and make development prone to errors. This dissertation is intended to present the design and use of a runtime (LISURT) [§] system and a domain specific language (LISURT DSL) [§] that are specifically targeted toward the development of scheduling policies. The runtime provides an interface in the linux kernel, which enables to plug in a new scheduling policy dynamically. The new policy is in the form of a module. There are two kinds of schedulers: ...