The real-time systems community has over the years devoted considerable attention to the impact on execution timing that arises from contention on access to hardware shared resources. The relevance of this problem has been accentuated with the arrival of multicore processors. From the state of the art on the subject, there appears to be considerable diversity in the understanding of the problem and in the “approach” to solve it. This sparseness makes it difficult for any reader to form a coherent picture of the problem and solution space. This paper draws a tentative taxonomy in which each known approach to the problem can be categorised based on its specific goals and assumptions.