Using Basic Block Based Instruction Prefetching to Optimize WCET Analysis for Real-Time Applications

Cache is an important component existing in modern computer system to bridge the performance gap between the fast CPU and the slow memory system. A variety of cache optimization technologies and mechanisms are proposed to improve the cache performance, such as instruction cache prefetching. Most instruction prefetching mechanisms existing are proposed to improve the average-case cache performance. However, real-time systems care more about the worst-case performance, and the worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis of real-time applications is critical for schedulability analysis of real-time systems. Due to its unpredictable behaviour, cache disastrously complicates the WCET analysis of real-time applications. In this paper, we proposed a basic block based instruction prefetching (BBIP) mechanism to improve both the average-case cache performance and the tightness of the WCET analysis of real-time applications. Measurements on typical real-time benchmarks show that BBIP can not only eliminate most of the instruction access misses, but also result in lower WCET estimations. To discuss the effectiveness of BBIP, we measured the WCET of the benchmarks for three processor configurations with and without BBIP: 1) processor with in-order pipeline and perfect branch prediction, 2) processor with out-of-order pipeline and perfect branch prediction, and 3) processor with out-of-order pipeline and 2-level branch prediction. The results show that BBIP can provide notable improvements in the tightness of WCET estimation, with the WCET values being 30.4% to 97.7% of the original ones. Our simulation results also reveal that 70% to 80% instruction access misses are eliminated with BBIP.