SysWCET: Whole-System Response-Time Analysis for Fixed-Priority Real-Time Systems (Outstanding Paper)

Abstract

The worst-case response time (WCRT) – the time span from release to completion of a real-time task – is a crucial property of real-time systems. However, WCRT analysis is complex in practice, as it depends not only on the realistic examination of worst-case execution times (WCET), but also on system-level overheads and blocking/preemption times. While the implicit path enumeration technique (IPET) has greatly improved automated WCET analysis, the resulting values still need to be aggregated manually with the system-level overheads – an errorprone and tedious process that yields overly pessimistic results. With SysWCET, we provide an integrated approach for the automated WCRT analysis across multiple threads of execution, locks, interrupt service routines, and the real-time operating system (RTOS) in particular. Our approach spans a single IPET formulation over the whole system and exploits RTOS and scheduler semantics to derive cross-kernel flow facts in order to significantly reduce pessimism in the WCRT analysis. We evaluate our approach with a fully functional implementation of SysWCET for the automotive OSEK-OS standard (ECC1), including threads, alarms, interrupt-service routines, events, and PCP-based resource management.