Thread Migration Strategies in the Context of Real-Time and Best-Effort Scheduling

BBB-Link: https://bbb.tu-dresden.de/b/mat-xin-oyh-xzn

Presentation Language: English

Thread migration offers a compelling mechanism for load balancing in multi-core systems, yet its overhead and cache disruption introduce risks that are particularly problematic in real-time contexts. A range of strategies, spanning partitioned, global, and semi-partitioned scheduling, have been proposed to address this tension.
In this work, I provide a systematic analysis of representative load balancing algorithms, evaluating them across four dimensions: real-time and best-effort suitability, required performance metrics, metric availability in microkernel environments, and deployability on real hardware. The algorithms are grouped into four categories: real-time approaches, general-purpose schedulers, enhanced operating system strategies, and large-scale or hardware-assisted mechanisms. The study concludes with a discussion of the significant gap between academic proposals and deployable systems, and identifies transferable ideas that could guide the design of a practically deployable load balancer for modern mixed-criticality systems.