Transparent and Selective Real-Time Interrupt Services for Performance Improvement

Abstract

The popularity of mobile and multimedia applications made real-time support a mandatory feature for embedded operating systems. However, the current situation is that the overall performance is significantly degraded due to the real-time support. This paper suggests a novel scheme to minimize the performance degradation in embedded operating systems with real-time support. Especially, we propose transparent and selective real-time interrupt services which transparently monitor the system and postpone interrupt handling that are not relevant to real-time tasks. The proposed scheme was implemented on the Linux 2.6 kernel and the experimental results show that our scheme improves the throughput by up to 86% for Hackbench benchmark while providing almost the same scheduling latency compared to the previous work.