Scratchpad memory management in a multitasking environment

Abstract

This paper presents a dynamic scratchpad memory (SPM) code allocation technique for embedded systems running an operating system with preemptive multitasking. Existing SPM allocation schemes do not support multiple tasks or only a fixed number of processes that are known at compile time. These schemes rely on algorithms that select code depending on the size of the SPM. In contemporary portable devices, however, processes are created and terminated on demand and the SPM is shared among them.We introduce a dynamic scratchpad memory code allocation technique for code that supports dynamically created processes. At runtime, an SPM manager (SPMM) loads code pages of the running applications into the SPM on demand. It supports different sharing strategies that determine how the SPM is distributed among the running processes. We analyze several sharing strategies with regard to several preferable properties of multiprocess SPM allocation schemes.We evaluate the proposed multiprocess SPM allocation techniques and compare them to a fully-cached reference system by running several multiprocess benchmarks. The benchmarks comprise of multiple embedded applications such as H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, and PGP. On average, we achieve a 47% improvement in throughput and a 32% reduction in energy consumption. A comparison with the unachievable lower bound shows that the best SPM sharing strategy exploits 87% of the runtime improvements and 89% of the energy savings possible.