Handling Resource Sharing and

Dependencies among Real Time

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• In many applications, real-time tasks need to share some resources
among themselves.
• Often these shared resources need to be used by the individual tasks
in exclusive mode.
• If a task is preempted before it completes using the resource, then
the resource can become corrupted. Example: Files, devices and
certain data structures.
• These resources are also called non-preemptable resources or critical
sections.

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Priority Inversion

• When a lower priority task is already holding a resource, a higher

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Unbounded Priority Inversion
• While even a simple priority inversion does delay a higher priority
task by sometime, the duration for which a task blocks due to a
simple priority inversion can be made very small if all tasks are made
to restrict themselves to very brief periods of critical section usage.
• Therefore, a simple priority inversion can easily be tolerated through
careful programming.
• However, a more serious problem that arises during sharing of critical
resource among tasks is unbounded priority inversion.

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Unbounded Priority Inversion
• Unbounded priority inversion occurs when a higher priority task waits
for a lower priority task to release a resource it needs, and in the
meanwhile intermediate priority tasks preempt the lower priority task
from CPU usage repeatedly.
• As a result, the lower priority task can not complete its usage of the
critical resource and the higher priority task waits indefinitely for its
required resource to be released.

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Unbounded Priority Inversion

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Unbounded Priority Inversion

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MARS Path Finder
• Landed on the MARS surface on July 4th, 1997
• Bounced onto the Martian surface surrounded by airbags.
• Deployed the Sojourner rover.
• Gathered and transmitted voluminous data back to Earth

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MARS Pathfinder Bug
• Pathfinder began experiencing total system resets: Each resulting in
loss of data
• The failures were reported as software glitches , the computers
inability to handle too many things etc.
• Engineers spent hours running exact spacecraft replica in lab:
replicated the precise conditions under which the reset occurred.
• Turning on priority inheritance would prevent the resets.
• Initialization parameters were stored in global variables.
• A short C program was uploaded to the spacecraft

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Priority Inheritance Protocol
• Whenever a task suffers priority inversion, the priority of the lower
priority task holding the resource is raised through a priority
inheritance mechanism.
• When many tasks are waiting for a resource, the task holding the
resource inherits the highest priority of all tasks waiting for the
resource.
• Since the priority of the low priority task holding the resource is
raised to equal the highest priority of all tasks waiting for the resource
being held by it, intermediate priority tasks can not preempt it and
unbounded priority inversion is avoided.

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• As soon as a task that had inherited the priority of a waiting higher
priority task releases the resource it gets back its original priority
value if it is holding no other critical resources.
• In case it is holding other critical resources, it would inherit the
priority of the highest priority task waiting for the resources being
held by it.

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Working of Priority Inheritance Protocol

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Priority changes Under PIP

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PIP pseudocode

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• PIP suffers from two important problems
• Deadlock
• Chain Blocking

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Deadlock
• The basic Priority Inheritance Protocol (PIP) leaves open the
possibility of deadlocks.
• Consider the following sequence of actions of two tasks T1 and T2
which need access to two shared critical resources CR1 and CR2.
• T1 : Lock CR1, Lock CR2, Unlock CR2, Unlock CR1
• T2 : Lock CR2, Lock CR1, Unlock CR1, Unlock CR2

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Chain Blocking
• A task is said to undergo chain blocking, if each time it needs a
resource, it undergoes priority inversion.
• If a task needs n resources for its computations, it might have to
undergo priority inversions n times to acquire all its resources.

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Chain Blocking in PIP

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 Highest Locker Protocol (HLP)
• In HLP every critical resource is assigned a ceiling priority value.
• The ceiling priority of a critical resource (CR) is defined as the maximum of all those
tasks which may request to use this resource.
• Under HLP, as soon as a task acquires a resource, its priority is set equal to the ceiling
priority of the resource.
• If a task holds multiple resources, then it inherits the highest ceiling priority of all its
locked resources.
• Consider a scheduler that follows FCFS scheduling policy among equal priority tasks.
Let the ceiling priority of a resource 𝑅𝑖 be denoted by Ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) and the priority of a
task 𝑇𝑖 be denoted as pri (𝑇𝑖 ). Then ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) is defined as
• Ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) = max ({pri (𝑇𝑖 )/ 𝑇𝑖 needs 𝑅𝑖 })
• The ceiling priority of a critical resource 𝑅𝑖 is the maximum of the priority of all tasks
that may use 𝑅𝑖
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• If higher priority values indicate lower priorities (Unix), then the
ceiling priority would be the minimum priority of all tasks needing the
resource. That is
• Ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) = min ({pri (𝑇𝑖 )/ 𝑇𝑖 needs 𝑅𝑖 })
• For operating systems supporting time sliced round robin scheduling
among equal priority tasks and larger priority value indicates higher
priority, the rule for computing the ceiling priority is :
• Ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) = max ({pri (𝑇𝑖 )/ 𝑇𝑖 needs 𝑅𝑖 }) + 1
• For the case where larger priority value indicates lower priority (and
time sliced round robin scheduling among equal priority tasks), the
rule for computing the ceiling priority is :
• Ceil (𝑅𝑖 ) = min ({pri (𝑇𝑖 )/ 𝑇𝑖 needs 𝑅𝑖 }) + 1

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Example
• A resource CR1 is shared by the tasks T1, T5 and T7 and CR2 is shared
by T5 and T7.
• Assume that the priority of T1 = 10, that of T5 = 5, priority of T7 = 2.
• Then, the priority of CR1 will be the maximum of the priorities of T1,
T5 and T7. Then the ceiling priority of CR1 is Ceil(CR1) = max({10, 5,
2}) = 10.
• Therefore, as soon as either of T1, T5 or T7 acquires CR1, its priority
will be raised to 10.
• The rule of inheritance of priority is that any task that acquires the
resource inherits the corresponding ceiling priority

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• If a task is holding more than one resource, its priority will become
maximum of the ceiling priorities of all the resources it is holding.
• For example, Ceil (CR2)==max{5,2}=5.
• A task holding both CR1 and CR2 would inherit the larger of the two
ceiling priorities i.e 10.

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• Shortcomings of HLP
• Possibility of Inheritance related inversion.
• Inheritance related inversion occurs when the priority of a low priority task
holding a resource is raised to a high value by the ceiling rule, the
intermediate priority tasks not needing the resource can not execute and are
said to undergo inheritance related inversion

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Different types of priority inversions under
PCP
• Direct Inversion
• Occurs when a higher priority task waits for a lower priority task to release a
resource that it needs.

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Identify the direct inversions

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Inheritance related Inversion

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• Inheritance related Inversion
• Consider a situation where a lower priority task is holding a resource and a
higher priority task is waiting for it.
• Then, the priority of the lower priority task is raised to that of the waiting
higher priority task.
• As a result, the intermediate priority tasks not needing the resource undergo
inheritance related inversion.

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Identify the inheritance related inversions

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Inversion Analysis

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