Investigating the Correctness and Efficiency of MrsP in Fully Partitioned Systems

MrsP is a FIFO spin-based protocol that adopts a helping mechanism, where a resource holder can migrate to a remote processor to keep executing if it is preempted. In practice, allowing resource-holding tasks to migrate can raise implementation issues and run-time corner cases. In this paper, we present an investigation of the correctness and efficiency of implementing MrsP in fully partitioned systems. We identify potential race conditions and corner cases of the protocol due to the use of migrations. Then, new facilities are proposed to pre- vent the issues and to provide more efficient resource-accessing behaviours. Finally, evaluations are performed to demonstrate the impact of the run-time issues and to testify the effect of proposed facilities.