Performance Comparison Of Locking Caches

Static use of locking caches is a useful solution to take advantage of cache memories in real-time systems. Locking cache operates preloading and locking a set of instructions, thus cache contents are a-priori known and remain unchanged during system operation. This solution eliminates the unpredictable behavior of conventional caches, making easy to accomplish the schedulability test through simple and well-known tools. Once attained predictability, in this paper we analyze the performance of this schema compared to conventional cache, as function of system size and cache size. We also study the influence of the scheduler (either fixed or dynamic priority). Copyright 2003 IFAC Keywords: real-time systems, cache memories, scheduling algorithms, performance analysis, genetic algorithms. 1