How-to articles about designing safe, reliable, and secure embedded systems.

Introduction to Rate Monotonic Scheduling

If you've got a lot of real-time tasks and tight deadlines, what's the best way to prioritize them? A technique called RMA guides the way.

The scheduling algorithm you choose depends on your goals. Different algorithms yield different results. Let's suppose you're given ten jobs and each will take a day to finish. In ten days, you will have all of them done. But what if one or more has a deadline? If the ninth task given to you has a deadline in three days, then doing the tasks in the order you receive them will cause you to miss that deadline.

Barr Group's engineers wrote these resources for working developers. When firmware and electronics end up in litigation, we also serve as software expert witnesses.