A Survey of Timing Verification Techniques for Multi-Core Real-Time Systems

This survey provides an overview of the scientific literature on timing verification techniques for multi-core real-time systems. It reviews the key results in the field from its origins around 2006 to the latest research published up to the end of 2018. The survey highlights the key issues involved in providing guarantees of timing correctness for multi-core systems. A detailed review is provided covering four main categories: full integration, temporal isolation, integrating interference effects into schedulability analysis, and mapping and allocation. The survey concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches, identifying open issues, key challenges, and possible directions for future research

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Today multicore processors are used in most modern systems that require computational logic. However, their applicability in systems with stringent timing requirements is still an ongoing research. This is due to the difficulty of ensuring the timing correctness of tasks executing on a multicore platform that comprises a number of shared hardware resources, e.g., caches, memory bus and the main memory. Concurrent accesses to any of these shared resources can generate uncontrolled interference, which complicates the estimations of tasks' worst-case execution time (WCET) and the worst-case response time (WCRT). The use of the 3-phase task execution model helps in upper bounding the contention due to the sharing of bus/main memory in multicore systems. It divides the execution of tasks into distinct memory and execution phases, where tasks can only access the bus/main memory during their memory phases. This makes bus/memory access patterns of tasks more predictable, enabling a preciser computation of bus/memory contention. In this work, we show how the bus contention can be computed for the 3-phase task model considering a work-conserving, i.e., round-robin (RR) based, arbitration policy at the memory bus. This is different from existing works that analyze the time-division multiple access (TDMA) and first-come-first-serve (FCFS) based bus arbitration policies. First, we present a solution to model the bus contention that can be suffered/caused by tasks executing on the same/remote cores of a multicore system under an RR-based bus arbitration scheme. We then evaluate the impact of resulting bus contention on taskset schedulability. Experimental results show that our proposed RR-based bus contention analysis can improve taskset schedulability by up to 100 percentage points than the TDMA-based analysis and up to 40 percentage points than the FCFS-based bus contention analysis.This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDB-UIDP/04234/2020); also by the Operational Competitiveness Programme and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020) under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by national funds through the FCT, within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029119 (PREFECT); also by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 - The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020, under grant agreement No. 732505. Project “TEC4Growth - Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER000020” financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement; also by FCT, under PhD grant 2020.09532.BD.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Arbitration-Induced Preemption Delays

The interactions among concurrent tasks pose a challenge in the design of real-time multi-core systems, where blocking delays that tasks may experience while accessing shared memory have to be taken into consideration. Various memory arbitration schemes have been devised that address these issues, by providing trade-offs between predictability, average-case performance, and analyzability. Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) is a well-known arbitration scheme due to its simplicity and analyzability. However, it suffers from low resource utilization due to its non-work-conserving nature. We proposed in our recent work dynamic schemes based on TDM, showing work-conserving behavior in practice, while retaining the guarantees of TDM. These approaches have only been evaluated in a restricted setting. Their applicability in a preemptive setting appears problematic, since they may induce long memory blocking times depending on execution history. These blocking delays may induce significant jitter and consequently increase the tasks\u27 response times. This work explores means to manage and, finally, bound these blocking delays. Three different schemes are explored and compared with regard to their analyzability, impact on response-time analysis, implementation complexity, and runtime behavior. Experiments show that the various approaches behave virtually identically at runtime. This allows to retain the approach combining low implementation complexity with analyzability