Randomized Caches Considered Harmful in Hard Real-Time Systems

Abstract

We investigate the suitability of caches with randomized placement and replacement in the context of hard real-time systems. Such caches have been claimed to drastically reduce the amount of information required by static worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, and to be an enabler for measurement-based probabilistic timing analysis. We refute these claims and conclude that with prevailing static and measurement-based analysis techniques caches with deterministic placement and least-recently-used replacement are preferable over randomized ones.