SlackCheck: A Linux Kernel Module to Verify Temporal Properties of a Task Schedule

The Linux Kernel offers several scheduling classes. From SCHED_DEADLINE down to SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR and SCHED_OTHER, the scheduling classes can provide different responsiveness to very diverse user workloads. Still, Linux does not offer any mechanism to take some action upon the violation of temporal constraints at runtime. The lack of such a feature is also due to the difficulty of extending the established notion of deadline to workloads which are not releasing periodic/sporadic jobs. Exploiting the notion of supply functions for any resource schedule, we implemented SlackCheck, a kernel module which is capable to verify at runtime if a given task is assigned a desired amount of resource or not. SlackCheck adds a constant-time check at every scheduling decision and leverages the recent availability of a Runtime Verification engine in the kernel.