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Towards a practical WCET analysis approach based on testing

[ecrts-wip08]Thomas Lundqvist and Patrik Sandin: "Towards a practical WCET analysis approach based on testing," in the Work in Progress Session of 20th Euromicro conference on real-time systems (ECRTS'08 WIP), June 2008.

Abstract

Analyzing the worst-case execution time, the WCET, of a program or task is an important activity when constructing hard real-time systems. Traditional techniques like testing and measurements now face problems due to the introduction of cache memories. This paper presents a new approach that enhances the traditional testing methodology with different analysis methods. The safeness of individual program paths are guaranteed by the use of a safety margin. Furthermore, the approach provides help for the tester to find the critical paths to measure. The approach is demonstrated for a processor containing an instruction cache. The results indicate that this promises to be a simple and practical approach that still can result in low overestimation of the WCET.

Keywords

Real-time systems, worst-case execution time, timing analysis, pipeline, caches.

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