An EDF scheduling class for the Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is mainly used is general-purpose operating system, i.e., in server and/or desktop environments. During the last years, however, academic institutions and companies showed an increasing interest in using it for real-time and control applications as well. However, since Linux has not been designed to be a real-time operating, the best-effort scheduling policy is not suited to provide high utilization and strong guarantees to time-sensitive tasks. We present an enhancement of the Linux scheduler through the implementation of the well known Earliest Deadline First algorithm for real-time tasks, leaving the current behavior of existing policies unchanged. It is integrated with the latest Linux scheduler, support multicore platforms, it is available for embedded architectures (like ARM) and can be used with either periodic or aperiodic workloads.