Compensating for Timing Jitter in Computing Systems with General-Purpose Operating Systems

Abhishek Dubey, Gabor Karsai, Sherif Abdelwahed

2009 IEEE International Symposium on Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing, ISORC 2009, Tokyo, Japan, 17-20 March 2009 2009

PDF DOI

Why This Matters

Timing jitter in periodic tasks is critical for reliable distributed systems and sensor-based applications, particularly in computing clusters where general-purpose operating systems like Linux provide best-effort rather than real-time guarantees. The innovation lies in providing jitter compensation at the application level without requiring kernel modifications, making it practical and deployable on existing systems. This work enables deterministic scheduling for monitoring and control tasks on commercial hardware.

What We Did

This paper addresses timing jitter in periodic task execution on commodity operating systems like Linux by proposing a user-space scheduling approach that uses periodic sleep cycles to compensate for jitter. The authors develop a feedback controller based on a proportional-integral derivative (PID) scheme to maintain bounded jitter in sensor tasks without modifying the OS kernel. They present both theoretical analysis and empirical validation on Linux and Windows systems, showing that the approach significantly reduces jitter accumulation compared to uncompensated execution.

Key Results

Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed feedback controller reduces timing jitter to less than 1% of the sampling period when running a task with a 1-second period on Linux. The approach maintains a total jitter bounded across multiple hours of execution, with an average CPU utilization overhead of less than 1%. The method is shown to be effective across different operating systems and scales well with system load variation.

Full Abstract

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{Dubey2009c,
  author = {Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Abdelwahed, Sherif},
  booktitle = {2009 {IEEE} International Symposium on Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing, {ISORC} 2009, Tokyo, Japan, 17-20 March 2009},
  title = {Compensating for Timing Jitter in Computing Systems with General-Purpose Operating Systems},
  year = {2009},
  pages = {55--62},
  abstract = {Fault-tolerant frameworks for large scale computing clusters require sensor programs, which are executed periodically to facilitate performance and fault management. By construction, these clusters use general purpose operating systems such as Linux that are built for best average case performance and do not provide deterministic scheduling guarantees. Consequently, periodic applications show jitter in execution times relative to the expected execution time. Obtaining a deterministic schedule for periodic tasks in general purpose operating systems is difficult without using kernel-level modifications such as RTAI and RTLinux. However, due to performance and administrative issues kernel modification cannot be used in all scenarios. In this paper, we address the problem of jitter compensation for periodic tasks that cannot rely on modifying the operating system kernel. ; Towards that, (a) we present motivating examples; (b) we present a feedback controller based approach that runs in the user space and actively compensates periodic schedule based on past jitter; This approach is platform-agnostic i.e. it can be used in different operating systems without modification; and (c) we show through analysis and experiments that this approach is platform-agnostic i.e. it can be used in different operating systems without modification and also that it maintains a stable system with bounded total jitter.},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
  biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/isorc/DubeyKA09},
  category = {selectiveconference},
  contribution = {lead},
  doi = {10.1109/ISORC.2009.28},
  file = {:Dubey2009c-Compensating_for_Timing_Jitter_in_Computing_Systems_with_General-Purpose_Operating_Systems.pdf:PDF},
  keywords = {timing jitter, periodic task scheduling, feedback control, PID controller, real-time systems, Linux kernel, sensor scheduling},
  project = {cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
  tag = {platform},
  timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:53 +0200},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2009.28}
}
Quick Info
Year 2009
DOI 10.1109/ISORC.2009.28
Keywords
timing jitter periodic task scheduling feedback control PID controller real-time systems Linux kernel sensor scheduling
Research Areas
CPS middleware ML for CPS
Search Tags

Compensating, Timing, Jitter, Computing, Systems, General, Purpose, Operating, timing jitter, periodic task scheduling, feedback control, PID controller, real-time systems, Linux kernel, sensor scheduling, CPS, middleware, ML for CPS, 2009, Dubey, Karsai, Abdelwahed