Programming Interfaces Guide

Priority Inversion

A time-sharing process can block a real-time process by acquiring a resource that is required by a real-time process. Priority inversion occurs when a higher priority process is blocked by a lower priority process. The term blocking describes a situation in which a process must wait for one or more processes to relinquish control of resources. Real-time processes might miss their deadlines if this blocking is prolonged.

Consider the case that is depicted in the following figure, where a high-priority process requires a shared resource. A lower priority process holds the resource and is preempted by an intermediate priority process, blocking the high-priority process. Any number of intermediate processes can be involved. All intermediate processes must finish executing, as well as the lower-priority process' critical section. This series of executions can take an arbitrarily long time.

Figure 12–1 Unbounded Priority Inversion

Context describes graphic.

This issue and the methods of dealing with this issue are described in Mutual Exclusion Lock Attributes in Multithreaded Programming Guide.