Cache-aware scheduling and analysis for multicores

The major obstacle to use multicores for real-time applications is that we may not predict and provide any guarantee on real-time properties of embedded software on such platforms; the way of handling the on-chip shared resources such as L2 cache may have a significant impact on the timing predictability. In this paper, we propose to use cache space isolation techniques to avoid cache contention for hard realtime tasks running on multicores with shared caches. We present a scheduling strategy for real-time tasks with both timing and cache space constraints, which allows each task to use a fixed number of cache partitions, and makes sure that at any time a cache partition is occupied by at most one running task. In this way, the cache spaces of tasks are isolated at run-time. As technical contributions, we have developed a sufficient schedulability test for non-preemptive fixed-priority scheduling for multicores with shared L2 cache, encoded as a linear programming problem. To impro...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EMSOFT
• Authors: Nan Guan, Martin Stigge, Wang Yi, Ge Yu
• Keywords: Cache, Cache Spaces, EMSOFT 2009, Schedulability Tests, Software Engineering