Static Profiling of the Worst-Case in Real-Time Programs

Florian Brandner, Stefan Hepp, Alexander Jordan

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    With the increasing performance demand in real-time systems it becomes more and more relevant to provide feedback to engineers and programmers, but also software development tools, on the performance-relevant code parts of a real-time program. So far, the information provided to programmers through tools was limited to an estimation of the worst-case execution time (WCET) and its associated worst-case execution path (WCEP). However, these metrics only provide partial information. Only those code parts that are on one of the WCEPs are indicated to the programmer. No information is provided for all other code parts. To give an accurate view covering the entire code base, tools in the spirit of standard program profiling tools are required.

    This work proposes an efficient approach to compute worst-case timing information for all code parts of a program using a complementary metric, called criticality. Every statement of a real-time program is assigned a criticality value, expressing how critical the respective code is with respect to the global WCET. This gives an accurate view to programmers how close the worst execution path passing through a specific part of a real-time program is to the global WCEP. We formally define the criticality metric and investigate some of its properties with respect to dominance in control-flow graphs. Exploiting some of those properties, we propose an algorithm that reduces the overhead of computing the metric to cover complete real-time programs.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    Publication date2012
    Pages101-110
    ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-1409-1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012
    Event20th International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems (RTNS 2012) - Pont à Mousson, France
    Duration: 8 Nov 20129 Nov 2012
    http://rtns2012.loria.fr/

    Conference

    Conference20th International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems (RTNS 2012)
    Country/TerritoryFrance
    CityPont à Mousson
    Period08/11/201209/11/2012
    Internet address

    Keywords

    • Criticality
    • Worst-Case Execution Time
    • Program Profiling
    • Program Analysis

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