Increasing Memory Utilization with Transient Memory Scheduling

In addition to predictability, both reliability and security are increasingly important for embedded systems. To limit the scope of errant behavior in open and mixed criticality systems, a common approach is to raise isolation barriers between software components. However, this decentralizes memory management across all system components. Memory is often cached and quickly accessible in each application. This paper introduces the TMEM system for increasing memory utilization while optimizing for application end-to-end constraints such as meeting deadlines. In addition to the traditional spatial multiplexing of memory, TMEM introduces the predictable temporal multiplexing of memory within caches in a system component, and memory scheduling to continually reallocate memory between components to best benefit the system. We find that TMEM is able to maintain the efficiency of caches, while also lowering both task tardiness and system memory requirements.