Soft Real-Time on Multiprocessors: Are Analysis-Based Schedulers ReallyWorth It?

The evolution of multicore platforms has led to much recent work on multiprocessor scheduling techniques for soft real-time workloads. However, end users routinely run such workloads atop general-purpose operating systems with seemingly good results, albeit typically on over-provisioned systems. This raises the question: when, if ever, is the use of an analysis-based scheduler actually warranted? In this paper, this question is addressed via a video-decoding case study in which a scheme based on the global Earliest-Deadline-First (G-EDF) algorithm was compared against Linux's CFS scheduler.