Work-in-Progress: A Holistic Approach to WCRT Analysis for Multicore Systems

Abstract

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore processors have become a preferable choice for modern systems to meet the increasing functionalities and computational demand of modern applications. However, the adoption of multicore platforms in hard real-time systems, i.e., systems that run applications with stringent timing requirements, is still under scrutiny. The main challenge that hinders the use of COTS multicore platforms in hard real-time systems is their unpredictability, which originates from the sharing of different hardware resources. A task executing on one core of a multicore platform has to compete with other co-running tasks (running on other cores) to access hardware resources such as the last-level cache (LLC), the interconnect (e.g., memory bus), and the main memory. This competition leads to inter-core contention which can significantly impact the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) and Worst-Case Response Time (WCRT) of tasks.