Scheduling Theory for Firmware
Most firmware priority assignments are opinions. Somebody decided the safety task was the most important thing in the system and gave it the highest priority, somebody else discovered the display flickered and bumped its task up, and three years later nobody can say whether the 1 kHz control loop meets its deadline — only that it seems to. Real-time scheduling theory replaces that with arithmetic. Given each task's execution time, its period and its deadline, it answers "does every task always meet its deadline" with a proof rather than a measurement campaign.