Increasing the Predictability of Modern COTS Hardware through Cache-Aware OS-Design

Abstract—Real-time operating systems have been around for some time, but they are never designed for being used on modern multi-core processors with unpredictable timing behavior. An important source of unpredictability is the different timing between the processor and the DRAM-controller. Operating-system-based cache management is one possibility to reduce the timing variations of the processor by controlling the code and data which resides in the cache. The cache eliminates the timing differences between the memory and the processor. I. MOTIVATION AND RELATED WORK With increasing complexity of today’s multi-core proces-sors, their timing behavior gets more unpredictable, which leads to big fluctuations of the execution times for tasks and operating system functions like interrupt handling. This means that the overall response time of a system depend