Firm Real-Time Processing in an Integrated Real-Time System

We explore the integration of firm real-time processing— where processing completed after its deadline has no value but some jobs may be terminated or skipped—into an integrated real-time system managing hard, soft, and non-realtime processes. We show that it is feasible to add firm realtime processing to an integrated environment and that concurrently executing soft real-time processes can benefit from the slack made available from dropped firm real-time jobs. We examine how dropping jobs of firm real-time tasks using different static and dynamic drop patterns reduces deadline misses of soft real-time tasks. Our results show that even a simple static drop pattern results in noticeable performance gain for other soft real-time processes and we argue that our dynamic approach, once implemented, will produce even better results.