Abstract

When developing real-time systems, the worst-case execution time (WCET) is a commonly used measure for predicting and analyzing program and system timing behavior. Such estimates should preferrably be provided by static WCET analysis tools. Their analysis is made difficult by features of common processors, such as pipelines and caches.This paper examines the properties of single-issue in-order pipelines, based on a mathematical model of temporal constraints. The key problem addressed is to determine the distance (measured in number of subsequent instructions) over which an instruction can affect the timing behavior of other instructions, and when this effect must be considered in static WCET analysis. We characterize classes of pipelines for which static analysis can safely ignore effects longer than some arbitrary threshold. For other classes of pipelines, pipeline effects can propagate across arbitrary numbers of instructions, making it harder to design safe and precise analysis methods.Based on our results, we discuss how to construct safe WCET analysis methods. We also prove when it is correct to use localworst-case approximations to construct an overall WCET estimate.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Full document

The PDF file did not load properly or your web browser does not support viewing PDF files. Download directly to your device: Download PDF document

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

Back to Top

Document information

Published on 01/01/2007

Volume 2007, 2007
DOI: 10.1007/3-540-45828-x_25
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

Document Score

0

Views 0
Recommendations 0

Share this document

claim authorship

Are you one of the authors of this document?