Difference between OS scheduling and RTOS scheduling

Question

Consider the function/process,

void task_fun(void) { while(1) } If this process were to run on a normal PC OS, it would happily run forever. But on a mobile phone, it would surely crash the entire phone in a matter of minutes as the HW watchdog expires and resets the system. On a PC, this process, after it expires its stipulated time slice would be scheduled out and a new runnable process would be scheduled to run.

My doubt is why cant we apply the same strategy on an RTOS? What is the performance limitation involved if such a scheduling policy is implemeted on an RTOS?

One more doubt is that I checked the schedule() function of both my PC OS ( Ubuntu ) and my phone which also runs Linux Kernel. I found both of them to be almost the same. Where is the watchdog handing done on my phone? My assumption is that scheduler is the one who starts the watchdog before letting a process run. Can someone point me where in code its being done?

Answer 1

The phone "crashing" is an issue with the phone design or the specific OS, not embedded OSes or RTOSes in general. It would 'starve' lower priority tasks (possibly including the watchdog service), which is probably what is happening here.

In most embedded RTOSes it is intended that all processes are defined at deployment by the system designer and the design is for all processes to be scheduled as required. Placing user defined or third party code on such a system can compromise its scheduling scheme as in your example. I would suggest that all such processes should run at the same low priority as all others so that the round-robin scheduler will service user application equally without compromising system services.

Phone operating systems are usually RTOS, but user processes should not run at higher priority that system processes. It may be intentional that such processes run higher than the watchdog service exactly to protect the system from "misbehaving" applications which yours simulates.

Most RTOSes use a pre-emptive priority based scheduler (highest priority ready task runs until it terminates, yields, or is pre-empted by a higher priority task or interrupt). Some also schedule round-robin for tasks at the same priority level (task runs until it terminates, yields or consumes its time-slice and other tasks of the same priority are ready to run).