CITTA: Cache Interference-Aware Task Partitioning for Real-Time Multi-core Systems

Shared caches in multi-core 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. Prior work has studied the schedulability analysis of global scheduling for real-Time multi-core systems with shared caches. This paper considers another common scheduling paradigm: partitioned scheduling in the presence of shared cache interference. To achieve this, we propose CITTA, a cache-interference aware task partitioning algorithm. An integer programming formulation is constructed to calculate the upper bound on cache interference exhibited by a task, which is required by CITTA. We conduct schedulability analysis of CITTA and formally prove its correctness. A set of experiments is performed to evaluate the schedulability performance of CITTA against global EDF scheduling over randomly generated tasksets. Our empirical evaluations show that CITTA outperforms global EDF scheduling in terms of task sets deemed schedulable.