If a given set of tasks do exceed the processor utilization upper limit imposed by the Processor Utilization Rule, they can still be guaranteed to meet all their deadlines by application of the First Deadline Rule. This rule can be stated as follows:
For a given set of independent periodic tasks, if each task meets its first deadline when all tasks are started at the same time, then the deadlines will always be met for any combination of start times.
A key point with this rule is that ALL periodic tasks are assumed to start at the exact same instant in time. Although this assumption may seem to be invalid, RTEMS makes it quite easy to ensure. By having a non-preemptible user initialization task, all application tasks, regardless of priority, can be created and started before the initialization deletes itself. This technique ensures that all tasks begin to compete for execution time at the same instant -- when the user initialization task deletes itself.
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