Multiprocessor Real-Time Locking Protocols: A Systematic Review

Abstract: We systematically survey the literature on analytically sound multiprocessor real-time locking protocols from 1988 until 2018, covering the following topics: progress mechanisms that prevent the lock-holder preemption problem, spin-lock protocols, binary semaphore protocols, independence-preserving (or fully preemptive) locking protocols, reader-writer and k-exclusion synchronization, support for nested critical sections, and implementation and system-integration aspects. A special focus is placed on the suspension-oblivious and suspension-aware analysis approaches for semaphore protocols, their respective notions of priority inversion, optimality criteria, lower bounds on maximum priority-inversion blocking, and matching asymptotically optimal locking protocols.