PDPA: period driven task and cache partitioning algorithm for multi-core systems

Multi-core architectures are well suited to fulfill the increasing performance requirements of embedded real-time systems. However, such systems also require the capacity to estimate the timing behavior of their critical components. Interference between tasks, as they occur on standard multi-core micro-architectures due to cache sharing are still difficult to predict accurately. An alternative is to remove these indirect interferences between tasks through partitioning of the shared cache and through the use of partitioned task scheduling. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for joint task and cache partitioning in multi-core systems scheduled using non-preemptive EDF. The main novelty of the algorithm is to take into account the tasks' period repartition in the task partitioning problem, which is critical in a non-preemptive context. Other task properties such as task cache requirements are also considered to optimize cache partitioning. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm for tasks and cache partitioning, named IA3 [18], in terms of schedulability, specially when tasks have varied periods.