Partial Program Admission

Real-time systems on non-preemptive platforms require a means of bounding the execution time of programs for admission purposes. Worst-case execution time (WCET) is most commonly used to bound program execution time. While bounding a programpsilas WCET statically is possible, computing its true WCET is difficult. We present a new technique we call partial program admission, a means of statically enforcing an otherwise untrusted assertion of WCET without adding runtime overhead, by means of code duplication. We apply this technique to real programs from the virtual networking arena and present the results.