Performance-controllable shared cache architecture for multi-core soft real-time systems

Multi-core processors with shared L2 caches can improve performance and integrate several functions of real-time systems on a single chip. However, tasks running on different cores increase interferences in the shared L2 cache, resulting in more deadline misses and, consequently, worse quality of real-time tasks. This is mainly because of the blind sharing of the L2 cache by multiple tasks running on different cores.We propose a novel performance-controllable shared L2 cache architecture that can alleviate these problems. First, our proposed L2 cache architecture is made to be aware of instructions/data belonging to real-time tasks by adding a real-time indication bit to each L2 cache block. Second, it can control the performance of real-time tasks and non-real-time tasks. Our experimental results show that our proposed L2 cache architecture reduces more deadline misses of real-time tasks than the conventional L2 cache architecture and partitioning schemes.