WCET-Centric dynamic instruction cache locking

Abstract

Cache locking is an effective technique to improve timing predictability in real-time systems. In static cache locking, the locked memory blocks remain unchanged throughout the program execution. Thus static locking may not be effective for large programs where multiple memory blocks are competing for few cache lines available for locking. In comparison, dynamic cache locking overcomes cache space limitation through time-multiplexing of locked memory blocks. Prior dynamic locking technique partitions the program into regions and takes independent locking decisions for each region. We propose a flexible loop-based dynamic cache locking approach. We not only select the memory blocks to be locked but also the locking points (e.g., loop level). We judiciously allow memory blocks from the same loop to be locked at different program points for WCET improvement. We design a constraint-based approach that incorporates a global view to decide on the number of locking slots at each loop entry point and then select the memory blocks to be locked for each loop. Experimental evaluation shows that our dynamic cache locking approach achieves substantial improvement of WCET compared to prior techniques. © 2014 EDAA.