Fixed or dynamic priority? That is the question

Since the first results published in 1973 by Liu and Layland on the Rate Monotonic (RM) and Earliest Deadline First (EDF) algorithms, a lot of progress has been made in the schedulability analysis of periodic task sets. Nevertheless, many important results are not widely known and several misconceptions still exist about the properties of these two scheduling methods. Surprisingly, an exhaustive comparison between fixed priority and dynamic priority scheduling is still missing and there is not a general agreement in the real-time community about the suitability of these two scheduling approaches for future real-time systems. The purpose of the panel is to present the most controversial issues to a wide specialized audience, starting a constructive and interactive discussion aimed at clarifying some critical points and drawing some missing research lines.