The design and implementation of the intel® real-time performance analyzer

Modern PCs support growing numbers of concurrently active independently authored real-time software applications and device drivers. The non realtime nature of PC OSes (Linux, Microsoft Windows, etc.) means that robust real-time software must cope with hold-offs without degradation in user perceivable application quality of service. The open nature of the PC platform necessitates measuring OS interrupt and thread latencies under concurrent load in order to determine with how much hold-off the application must cope. The Intel® Real-Time Performance Analyzer is a toolkit for PCs running Microsoft Windows. The toolkit statistically characterizes thread and interrupt latencies plus Windows Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) and kernel Work Item latencies. The toolkit also has facilities for analyzing the causes of long latencies. These latencies can then be incorporated as additional blocking times in a real-time schedulability analysis. An isochronous workload tool is included to model thread and DPC based computation and detect missed deadlines.