Accurate estimation of cache-related preemption delay

Multitasked real-time systems often employ caches to boost performance. However the unpredictable dynamic behavior of caches makes schedulability analysis of such systems difficult. In particular, the effect of caches needs to be considered for estimating the inter-task interference. As the memory blocks of different tasks can map to the same cache blocks, preemption of a task may introduce additional cache misses. The time penalty introduced by these misses is called the cache-related preemption delay (CRPD). In this paper, we provide a program path analysis technique to estimate CRPD. Our technique performs path analysis of both the preempted and the preempting tasks. Furthermore, we improve the accuracy of the analysis by estimating the possible states of the entire cache at each possible preemption point rather than estimating the states of each cache block independently. To avoid incurring high space requirements, the cache states can be maintained symbolically as a binary decision diagram. Experimental results indicate that we obtain tight CRPD estimates for realistic benchmarks.