Learning Memory-Contention Timing Models With Automated Platform Profiling

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore platforms are often used to enable the execution of mixed-criticality real-time applications. In these systems, the memory subsystem is one of the most notable sources of interference and unpredictability, with the memory controller (MC) being a key component orchestrating the data flow between processing units and main memory. The worst-case response times of real-time tasks is indeed particularly affected by memory contention and, in turn, by the MC behavior as well. This article presents FrATM2, a Framework to Automatically learn the Timing Models of the Memory subsystem. The framework automatically generates and executes micro-benchmarks on bare-metal hardware to profile the platform behavior in a large number of memory-contention scenarios. After aggregating and filtering the collected measurements, FrATM2 trains MC models to bound memory-related interference. The MC models can be used to enable response-time analysis. The framework was evaluated on an AMD/Xilinx Ultrascale+ SoC, collecting gigabytes of raw experimental data by testing tents of thousands of contention scenarios.