Hardware Contention-Aware Real-Time Scheduling on Multi-Core Platforms in Safety-Critical Systems

  • While the computing industry has shifted from single-core to multi-core processors for performance gain, safety-critical systems (SCSs) still require solutions that enable their transition while guaranteeing safety, requiring no source-code modifications and substantially reducing re-development and re-certification costs, especially for legacy applications that are typically substantial. This dissertation considers the problem of worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis under contentions when deadline-constrained tasks in independent partitioned task set execute on a homogeneous multi-core processor with dynamic time-triggered shared memory bandwidth partitioning in SCSs. Memory bandwidth in multi-core processors is shared across cores and is a significant cause of performance bottleneck and temporal variability of multiple-orders in task’s execution times due to contentions in memory sub-system. Further, the circular dependency is not only between WCET and CPU scheduling of others cores, but also between WCET and memory bandwidth assignments over time to cores. Thus, there is need of solutions that allow tailoring memory bandwidth assignments to workloads over time and computing safe WCET. It is pragmatically infeasible to obtain WCET estimates from static WCET analysis tools for multi-core processors due to the sheer computational complexity involved. We use synchronized periodic memory servers on all cores that regulate each core’s maximum memory bandwidth based on allocated bandwidth over time. First, we present a workload schedulability test for known even-memory-bandwidth-assignment-to-active-cores over time, where the number of active cores represents the cores with non-zero memory bandwidth assignment. Its computational complexity is similar to merge-sort. Second, we demonstrate using a real avionics certified safety-critical application how our method’s use can preserve an existing application’s single-core CPU schedule under contentions on a multi-core processor. It enables incremental certification using composability and requires no-source code modification. Next, we provide a general framework to perform WCET analysis under dynamic memory bandwidth partitioning when changes in memory bandwidth to cores assignment are time-triggered and known. It provides a stall maximization algorithm that has a complexity similar to a concave optimization problem and efficiently implements the WCET analysis. Last, we demonstrate dynamic memory assignments and WCET analysis using our method significantly improves schedulability compared to the stateof-the-art using an Integrated Modular Avionics scenario.

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Metadaten
Author:Ankit Agrawal
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-56124
Advisor:Gerhard Fohler
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language of publication:English
Date of Publication (online):2019/05/07
Year of first Publication:2019
Publishing Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Granting Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Acceptance Date of the Thesis:2019/04/26
Date of the Publication (Server):2019/05/07
Tag:WCET; multi-core processors; real-time systems
Page Number:XVII, 101
Faculties / Organisational entities:Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
CCS-Classification (computer science):C. Computer Systems Organization / C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS (J.7)
DDC-Cassification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 500 Naturwissenschaften
Licence (German):Creative Commons 4.0 - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitung (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)