Avoiding the WCET overestimation on LRU instruction cache

Journal of Systems Architecture, 2011

In multitasking real-time systems it is required to compute the WCET of each task and also the effects of interferences between tasks in the worst case. This is very complex with variable latency hardware, such as instruction cache memories, or, to a lesser extent, the line buffers usually found in the fetch path of commercial processors. Some methods disable cache replacement so that it is easier to model the cache behavior. The difficulty in these cache-locking methods lies in obtaining a good selection of the memory lines to be locked into cache. In this paper, we propose an ILP-based method to select the best lines to be loaded and locked into the instruction cache at each context switch (dynamic locking), taking into account both intra-task and inter-task interferences, and we compare it with static locking. Our results show that, without cache, the spatial locality captured by a line buffer doubles the performance of the processor. When adding a lockable instruction cache, dynamic locking systems are schedulable with a cache size between 12.5% and 50% of the cache size required by static locking. Additionally, the computation time of our analysis method is not dependent on the number of possible paths in the task. This allows us to analyze large codes in a relatively short time (100 KB with 10 65 paths in less than 3 min).

… , Circuits and Systems, …, 2008

Cache memories have been widely used in order to bridge the gap between high speed processors and relatively slower main memories, and thus to improve the overall performance of systems. However in the context of hard real-time systems, they are a source of predictability problems. A lot of progress has been achieved to model caches to statically determine safe and precise bounds on the worst-case execution times (WCETs) estimates of tasks on architectures with caches. Nonetheless cache-aware WCET analysis techniques may not always be applicable or may be too pessimistic, because some memory accesses are unknown statically. Another reason may come from a poorly documented or non-deterministic cache line replacement policy. An alternative approach is to lock cache lines so as to make memory access times entirely predictable.

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2014

With the advent of multi-core architectures, worst case execution time (WCET) analysis has become an increasingly difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a unified WCET analysis framework for multi-core processors featuring both shared cache and shared bus. Compared to other previous works, our work differs by modeling the interaction of shared cache and shared bus with other basic micro-architectural components (e.g. pipeline and branch predictor). In addition, our framework does not assume a timing anomaly free multicore architecture for computing the WCET. A detailed experiment methodology suggests that we can obtain reasonably tight WCET estimates in a wide range of benchmark programs.

Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis - CODES+ISSS '07, 2007

Caches are notorious for their unpredictability. It is difficult or even impossible to predict if a memory access results in a definite cache hit or miss. This unpredictability is highly undesired for real-time systems. The Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of a software running on an embedded processor is one of the most important metrics during real-time system design. The WCET depends to a large extent on the total amount of time spent for memory accesses. In the presence of caches, WCET analysis must always assume a memory access to be a cache miss if it can not be guaranteed that it is a hit. Hence, WCETs for cached systems are imprecise due to the overestimation caused by the caches.

12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006

The estimation of the Worst-Case Execution Time of hard real-time applications becomes very hard as more and more complex processors are used in realtime systems. In modern architectures, estimating the execution time of a single basic block is not trivial due to possible timing anomalies linked to out-of-order execution. The influence of preceding basic blocks on the pipeline state also has to be accounted for. Recently, graphs have been used to model the execution of a block on a dynamically-scheduled pipelined processor [11]. In this paper we extend this model to express instruction-level parallelism so that superscalar processors with multiple functional units can be analyzed. Simulation results show how this extended model estimates WCETs tightly even when a realistic processor is considered. They also give an insight into the complexity of the model in terms of analysis time.

2011 17th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, 2011

Caches are widely used in modern computer systems to bridge the increasing gap between processor speed and memory access time. On the other hand, presence of caches, especially data caches, complicates the static worst case execution time (WCET) analysis. Access pattern analysis (e.g., cache miss equations) are applicable to only a specific class of programs, where all array accesses must have predictable access patterns. Abstract interpretation-based methods (must/persistence analysis) determines possible cache conflicts based on coarse-grained memory access information from address analysis, which usually leads to significantly pessimistic estimation. In this paper, we first present a refined persistence analysis method which fixes the potential underestimation problem in the original persistence analysis. Based on our new persistence analysis, we propose a framework to combine access pattern analysis and abstract interpretation for accurate data cache analysis. We capture the dynamic behavior of a memory access by computing its temporal scope (the loop iterations where a given memory block is accessed for a given data reference) during address analysis. Temporal scopes as well as loop hierarchy structure (the static scopes) are integrated and utilized to achieve a more precise abstract cache state modeling. Experimental results shows that our proposed analysis obtains up to 74% reduction in the WCET estimates compared to existing data cache analysis.

These last years, many researchers have proposed solutions to estimate the Worst-Case Execution Time of a critical application when it is run on modern hardware. Several schemes commonly implemented to improve performance have been considered so far in the context of static WCET analysis: pipelines, instruction caches, dynamic branch predictors, execution cores supporting out-of-order execution, etc. Comparatively, components that are external to the processor have received lesser attention. In particular, the latency of memory accesses is generally considered as a fixed value. Now, modern DRAM devices support the open page policy that reduces the memory latency when successive memory accesses address the same memory row. This scheme, also known as row buffer, induces variable memory latencies, depending on whether the access hits or misses in the row buffer. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to take the open page policy into account when estimating WCETs for a processor with a...

2009

Cache is effective in bridging the gap between processor and memory speed. It is also a source of unpredictability because of its dynamic and adaptive behavior. Worst-case execution time (WCET) of an application is one of the most important criteria for real-time embedded system design. The unpredictability of instruction miss/hit behavior in the instruction cache (I-Cache) leads to an unnecessary overestimation of the real-time application's WCET. A lot of modern processors provide cache locking capability. Static I-Cache locking locks function/instruction blocks of a program into the I-Cache before program execution. In this way, a more precise estimation of WCET can be achieved. The selection of functions/instructions to be locked in the I-Cache has dramatic influence on the performance of the real-time application. This paper focuses on the static I-Cache locking problem to minimize WCET for real-time embedded systems. We formulate the problem using an Execution Flow Tree (EF T) and a linear programming model. For a subset of the problems with certain properties, corresponding polynomial time optimal algorithms are proposed. We prove that the general problem is an NP-Hard problem. We also show that for a subset of the general problem with certain patterns, optimal solutions can be achieved in polynomial time. Experimental results show that our algorithms can reduce the WCET of applications further compared to current best known techniques.

Journal of Systems Architecture, 2013

In real-time systems, time is usually so critical that other parameters such as energy consumption are often not even considered. However, optimizing the worst energy consumption case can be a key factor in systems with severe power-supply limitations. In this paper we study several memory architectures using combined time and energy optimization models for real-time multitasking systems. Each task is modeled using Lock-MS, a method to optimize the WCET of a task, with an added set of constraints to model in the same way the WCEC (worst case energy consumption). Our tested hardware components focus on instruction fetching, including a lockable cache, a line buffer and a sequential prefetch buffer. We test a variety of instruction fetch alternatives optimizing time and energy consumption. Our results show that the accuracy of the estimation of the number of context switches in the worst case may affect very much the resulting WCEC (up to 8 times in our experiments) and that optimizing the WCEC may provide similar execution times than optimizing the WCET, with up to 5 times less energy consumption. Additionally optimization functions combining WCET and WCEC with different weights show very interesting WCET-WCEC trade-offs. This confirms that methodologies testing such optimizations at design time could be very helpful to provide a precise system setup .