Schedulability Analysis of Non-preemptive Real-time Scheduling for Multicore Processors with Shared Caches

Shared caches in multicore processors introduce serious difficulties in providing guarantees on the real-time properties of embedded software due to the interaction and the resulting contention in the shared caches. To address this problem, we develop a new schedulability analysis for real-time multicore systems with shared caches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the schedulability problem with inter-core cache interference. We construct an integer programming formulation, which can be transformed to an integer linear programming formulation, to calculate an upper bound on cache interference exhibited by a task within a given execution window. Using the integer programming formulation, an iterative algorithm is presented to obtain the upper bound on cache interference a task may exhibit during one job execution. The upper bound on cache interference is subsequently integrated into the schedulability analysis to derive a new schedulability condition. A range of experiments is performed to investigate how the schedulability is degraded by shared cache interference.