Reducing End-to-End Latency of Cause-Effect Chains with Shared Cache Analysis

Abstract: Cause-effect chains, as a widely used modeling method in real-time embedded systems, are extensively applied in various safety-critical domains. End-to-end latency, as a key real-time attribute of cause-effect chains, is crucial in many applications. But the analysis of end-to-end latency for cause-effect chains on multicore platforms with shared caches still presents an unresolved issue. Traditional methods typically assume that the worst-case execution time (WCET) of each task in the cause-effect chain is known. However, in the absence of scheduling information, these methods often assume that all shared cache accesses result in misses, leading to an overestimation of WCET and, consequently, affecting the accuracy of end-to-end latency. However, effectively integrating scheduling information into the WCET analysis process of the chains may introduce two challenges: first, how to leverage the structural characteristics of the chains to optimize shared cache analysis, and second, how to improve analysis accuracy while avoiding state space explosion. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end latency analysis framework designed for multi-chain systems on multicore platforms with shared caches. This framework extracts scheduling information and structural characteristics of cause-effect chains, constructing fine-grained and scalable inter-core memory access contexts at the basic block level for time-sensitive shared cache analysis. This results in more accurate WCET (TSC-WCET) estimates, which are then used to derive the end-to-end latency. Finally, we conduct experiments on dual-core and quad-core systems with various cache configurations, which show that under certain settings, the average maximum end-to-end latency of cause-effect chains is reduced by up to 34% and 26%.