Run-Time Cache-Partition Controller for Multi-Core Systems

The current trend in automotive systems is to integrate more software applications into fewer ECU's to decrease the cost and increase efficiency. This means more applications share the same resources which in turn can cause congestion on resources such as such as caches. Shared resource congestion may cause problems for time critical applications due to unpredictable interference among applications. It is possible to reduce the effects of shared resource congestion using cache partitioning techniques, which assign dedicated cache lines to different applications. We propose a cache partition controller called LLC-PC that uses the Palloc page coloring framework to decrease the cache partition sizes for applications during runtime. LLC-PC creates cache partitioning directives for the Palloc tool by evaluating the performance gained from increasing the cache partition size. We have evaluated LLC-PC using 3 different applications, including the SIFT image processing algorithm which is commonly used for feature detection in vision systems. We show that LLC-PC is able to decrease the amount of cache size allocated to applications while maintaining their performance allowing more cache space to be allocated for other applications.