Improving the Accuracy of Cache-Aware Response Time Analysis Using Preemption Partitioning

Schedulability analyses for preemptive real-time systems need to take into account cache-related preemption delays (CRPD) caused by preemptions between the tasks. The estimation of the CRPD values must be sound, i.e. it must not be lower than the worst-case CRPD that may occur at runtime, but also should minimise the pessimism of estimation. The existing methods over-approximate the computed CRPD upper bounds by accounting for multiple preemption combinations which cannot occur simultaneously during runtime. This over-approximation may further lead to the over-approximation of the worst-case response times of the tasks, and therefore a false-negative estimation of the system’s schedulability. In this paper, we propose a more precise cache-aware response time analysis for sporadic real-time systems under fully-preemptive fixed priority scheduling. The evaluation shows a significant improvement over the existing state of the art approaches.