A Few Results on Non-Preemptive Real Time Scheduling

In this paper, we investigate the non-preemptive scheduling problem as it arises in single processor systems. We focus on non-idling scheduling, the idling scheduling is briefly introduced in the last section. We extend some previous published results concerning preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling over a single processor. The main issue that we study in this article is the applicability and/or adaptation of results obtained in preemptive scheduling. In a first part we embark on revisiting aperiodic non idling non preemptive scheduling. We review complexity results and investigate conditions under which Earliest Deadline First is optimal in non preemptive scheduling. In a second part, we scrutinize periodic non idling non preemptive scheduling and we show that for non preemptive scheduling feasibility must be checked on a time interval of duration r+2P (r denotes the maximum of the release times and P the smallest common multiple of the task periods). We also show that a well established result concerning feasibility of task sets under non preemptive scheduling (no overload on any given time intervals) has no equivalence in non preemptive scheduling even if one takes into account the blocking factor. The third part is a very quick introduction to scheduling problems in an idling and non preemptive context