Combining Prefetch with Instruction Cache Locking in Multitasking Real-Time Systems

In multitasking real-time systems it is required to compute the WCET of each task and also the effects of interferences between tasks in the worst case. This is complex with variable latency hardware usually found in the fetch path of commercial processors. Some methods disable cache replacement so that it is easier to model the cache behavior. Lock-MS is an ILP based method to obtain the best selection of memory lines to be locked in a dynamic locking instruction cache. In this paper we first propose a simple memory architecture implementing the next-line tagged prefetch, specially designed for hard real-time systems. Then, we extend Lock-MS to add support for hardware instruction prefetch. Our results show that the WCET of a system with prefetch and an instruction cache with size 5% of the total code size is better than that of a system having no prefetch and cache size 80% of the code. We also evaluate the effects of the prefetch penalty on the resulting WCET, showing that a system without prefetch penalties has a worst-case performance 95\% of the ideal case. This highlights the importance of a good prefetch design. Finally, the computation time of our analysis method is relatively short, analyzing tasks of 96 KB with 10^65 paths in less than 3 minutes.