An Overview of Interrupt Accounting Techniques for Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

The importance of accounting for interrupts in multiprocessor real-time schedulability analysis is discussed and three interrupt accounting methods, namely quantum-centric, task-centric, and processor-centric accounting, are analyzed and contrasted. Additionally, two special cases, dedicated interrupt handling (i.e., all interrupts are processed by one processor) and timer multiplexing (i.e., all jobs are released by a single hardware timer), are considered and corresponding analysis is derived. All discussed approaches are evaluated in terms of schedulability based on interrupt costs previously measured on a Sun Niagara multicore processor.