WCET code positioning

Some processors incur a pipeline delay whenever an instruction transfers control to a target that is not the next sequential instruction. Compiler writers attempt to reduce these delays by positioning the basic blocks within a function to minimize the number of unconditional jumps and taken conditional branches that occur. Such a code positioning algorithm is traditionally driven by profile data representing typical program executions where pairs of blocks are placed in contiguous order when the transitions between these blocks occur most frequently. In this paper we describe an approach to perform code positioning without profiling in an attempt to reduce WCET instead of ACET. Our compiler interacts with a timing analyzer to obtain WCET path information to guide the block positioning. The results show over a 9% average reduction in WCET is achieved after code positioning is performed and our greedy WCET code positioning algorithm always achieves optimal results for our benchmark suite.