INC-OC

Real-time and cyber-physical systems need to interact with and respond to their physical environment in a predictable time. While multicore platforms provide incredible computational power and throughput, they also introduce new sources of unpredictability. Large fluctuations in latency to access data shared between multiple cores is an important contributor to the overall execution-time variability. In addition to the temporal unpredictability introduced by caching, parallel applications with data shared across multiple cores also pay additional latency overheads due to data coherence.

Analyzing the impact of data coherence on the worst-case execution-time of real-time applications is challenging because only scarce implementation details are revealed by manufacturers. This work introduces application-level control for caching data at different levels of the cache hierarchy making latency to access data present in caches independent of the coherence state. A new memory type Inner-NonCacheable, Outer-Cacheable (INC-OC) is implemented with OS and architectural support on the Gem5 simulator. Worst-case execution time for a single memory write request is reduced by 52% while benchmark evaluations show that the proposed technique has a minimal impact on average performance.