EDZL scheduling analysis

A schedulability test is derived for the global Earliest Deadline Zero Laxity (EDZL) scheduling algorithm on a platform with multiple identical processors. The test is sufficient, but not necessary, to guarantee that a system of independent sporadic tasks with arbitrary deadlines will be successfully scheduled, with no missed deadlines, by the multiprocessor EDZL algorithm. Global EDZL is known to be at least as effective as global Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF) in scheduling task sets to meet deadlines. It is shown, by testing on large numbers of pseudo-randomly generated task sets, that the combination of EDZL and the new schedulability test is able to guarantee that far more task sets meet deadlines than the combination of EDF and known EDF schedulability tests. In the second part of the paper, an improved version of the EDZL-schedulability test is presented. This new algorithm is able to efficiently exploit information on the slack values of interfering tasks, to iteratively refine the estimation of the interference a task can be subjected to. This iterative algorithm is shown to have better performance than the initial test, in terms of schedulable task sets detected.