WCET Analysis of Unified Cache with Software Prefetching

Many high-performance embedded processors have been introduced multistage cache, hardware and software prefetching mechanisms. In order to support software prefetching of hard real-time tasks with the predictability of the execution time, a kind of unified cache WCET analysis method with software prefetching was presented. This method extended the software prefetching semantic for traditional cache abstract interpretation model to analyze the influence of software prefetching on the worse-case performance and energy consumption of the tasks. Experimental results show that the method presented in this paper can effectively support unified cache behavior analysis with software prefetching; At the same time, for some hard real-time tasks with larger cache misses, software prefetching may make the WCET decrease 22.9% on average and the energy consumption reduce 24.1% on average.