Abstract. The determination of upper bounds on execution times, commonly called WorstCase Execution Times (WCETs), is a necessary step in the development and validation process for hard real-time systems. This problem is hard if the underlying processor architecture has components such as caches, pipelines, branch prediction, and other speculative components. This article describes different approaches to this problem and surveys several commercially available tools and research prototypes.
Cache prediction for preemptive scheduling is an open issue despite its practical importance. First analysis approaches use simplified models for cache behavior or they assume simplified preemption and execution scenarios that seriously impact analysis precision. We present an analysis approach which considers multiple executions of processes and preemption scenarios for static priority periodic scheduling. The results of our experiments show that caches introduce a strong and complex timing dependency between process executions that are not appropriately captured in the simplified models.
Caches are needed to increase the processor performance, but the temporal behavior is difficult to predict, especially in embedded systems with preemptive scheduling. Current approaches use simplified assumptions or propose complex analysis algorithms to bound the cache-related preemption delay. In this paper, a scalable preemption delay analysis for associative instruction caches to control the analysis precision and the time-complexity is proposed. An accurate preemption delay calculation is integrated into a cache-aware schedulability analysis. The framework is evaluated in several experiments.
ACM Reference Format:Staschulat, J. and Ernst, R. 2007. Scalable precision cache analysis for real-time software.
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