See Rob Davis' presentation "Response Time Upper Bounds for Fixed Priority Real-Time Systems" at RTSS, Barcelona, Nov 30-Dec 3

Rapita Director, Rob Davis, will be presenting "Response Time Upper Bounds for Fixed Priority Real-Time Systems" at RTSS, at Barcelona, Spain. The paper was written jointly with Professor Alan Burns of University of York. Further information on RTSS can be found at http://www.rtss.org Abstract This paper derives closed form upper bounds on the response times of tasks in fixed priority real-time systems. These bounds are valid for tasks with arbitrary deadlines, release jitter, and blocking. Response time upper bounds are given for tasks that are scheduled pre-emptively, co-operatively with intervals where pre-emption is deferred, and nonpreemptively. The set of upper bounds for n tasks can be computed in O(n) time, providing a linear-time sufficient schedulability test, applicable to complex commercial real-time systems.