Towards analysing cache-related preemption delay in non-inclusive cache hierarchies

The impact of preemptions has to be considered when determining the schedulability of a task set in a preemptively scheduled system. In particular, the contents of caches can be disturbed by a preemption, thus creating context-switching costs. These context-switching costs occur when a preempted task needs to reload data from memory after a preemption. The additional delay created by this effect is termed cache-related preemption delay (CRPD). The analysis of CRPD has been extensively studied for single-level caches in the past. However, for two-level caches, the analysis of CRPD is still an emerging area of research. In contrast to a single-level cache, which is only affected by direct preemption effects, the second-level cache in a two-level hierarchy can be subject to indirect interference after a preemption. Accesses that could be served from the L1 cache in the absence of preemptions, may be forwarded to the L2 cache, as the relevant data was evicted by a preemption. These accesses create the indirect interference in the L2 cache and can cause further evictions. Recently, a CRPD analysis for two-level non-inclusive cache hierarchies was proposed. In this article, we show that this state-of-the-art analysis is unsafe as it potentially underestimates the CRPD. Furthermore, we show that the analysis is pessimistic and can overestimate the indirect preemption effects. To address these issues, we propose a novel analysis approach for the CRPD in a two-level non-inclusive cache hierarchy. We prove the correctness of the presented approach based on the set of feasible program execution traces. We implemented the presented approach in a worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis tool and compared the performance to existing analysis methods. Our evaluation shows that the presented analysis increases task set schedulability by up to 14 percentage points compared with the state-of-the-art analysis.