Synchronization is hard in real-time applications, but not as hard as people imagine. If you follow a few simple rules you can make it manageable.
- Never force priority and mutual exclusion to fight each other. You can’t mean “Task A is more important than TaskB” and “TaskB should be able to lock TaskA out of some data structure as long as it want” at the same time.
- Long critical sections are sure signals of bad design. Use a simpler data structure or a client/server architecture or something.
- Stick to two or three mechanisms. If semaphores and RT-Fifos don’t do the trick, then maybe you should simplify your design.
See my paper for more details.
Synchronization blues