User Adjustable Process Scheduling Mechanism for a Multiprocessor Embedded System

The multiprocessor computer systems become more popular for the improvement of the processor’s design and fabrication’s evolution. In the past, the multiprocessors systems are usually adopted in server systems. Nowadays, the configurations of multiprocessor are also adopted in the personal computers or embedded systems. But we cannot achieve the optimal performance of the multiprocessor systems efficiently because task-scheduling mechanism cannot be adjusted for the real performing situation. Even the task-scheduler of the operating system cannot handle this problem. Also, the parallel program is hard to develop for the specific system to improve performance. In this paper, we provide a tool, called MONOPOLY, for users to adjust the scheduling policies of OS dynamically. It can improve the utilization of the multiple processors’ resources by allowing user to occupy a processor to make the specified program execute solely. In our experiment, the results show that the program will finish faster by using MONOPOLY. When the system is fully loaded, the execution time of the program with MONOPOLY will be much shorter then the program without this tool. Key-word: MONOPOLY, Multiprocessor, User Adjustable Process Scheduling, Operating System, Embedded System