Scheduling-context capabilities: a principled, light-weight operating-system mechanism for managing time

Mixed-criticality systems (MCS) combine real-time components of different levels of criticality - i.e. severity of failure - on the same processor, in order to obtain good resource utilisation. They must be able to guarantee deadlines of highly-critical threads without any dependence on less-critical threads. This requires strong temporal isolation, similar to the spatial isolation that is traditionally provided by operating systems, without unnecessary loss of processor utilisation. We present a model that uses scheduling contexts as first-class objects to represent time, and integrates seamlessly with the capability-based protection model of the seL4 microkernel. We show that the model comes with minimal overhead, and supports implementation of arbitrary scheduling policies as well as criticality switches at user level.