Timing Analysis for Data and Wrap-Around Fill Caches

Abstract

The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, an automatic tool-based approach is described to bound worst-case data cache performance. The approach works on fully optimized code, performs the analysis over the entire control flow of a program, detects and exploits both spatial and temporal locality within data references, and produces results typically within a few seconds. Results obtained by running the system on representative programs are presented and indicate that timing analysis of data cache behavior usually results in significantly tighter worst-case performance predictions. Second, a method to deal with realistic cache filling approaches, namely wrap-around-filling for cache misses, is presented as an extension to pipeline analysis. Results indicate that worst-case timing predictions become significantly tighter when wrap-around-fill analysis is performed. Overall, the contribution of this paper is a comprehensive report on methods and results of worst-case timing analysis for data caches and wrap-around caches. The approach taken is unique and provides a considerable step toward realistic worst-case execution time prediction of contemporary architectures and its use in schedulability analysis for hard real-time systems.