Bounding Preemption Delay Within Data Cache Reference Patterns for Real-Time Tasks

Caches have become invaluable for higher-end architectures to hide, in part, the increasing gap between processor speed and memory access times. While the effect of caches on timing predictability of single real-time tasks has been the focus of much research, bounding the overhead of cache warm-ups after preemptions remains a challenging problem, particularly for data caches. In this paper, the authors bound the penalty of cache interference for real-time tasks by providing accurate predictions of the data cache behavior across preemptions. For every task, they derive data cache reference patterns for all scalar and non-scalar references. Partial timing of a task is performed up to a preemption point using these patterns.