Scratchpad Memory (SPM) is an alternative to cache. With SPM, the CPU¡¦s fast internal memory (ie, the SRAM) is directly mapped into the memory address space. This has the advantages of reduced power (by avoiding the memory management Unit, MMU, that a cache need to manage its tags and evictions), reduced area (for the same reason), and predictability.[1] Predictability is important in real-time systems, because each task must be assigned a deadline. If a task finishes early, there is no benefit. But if a task finishes late, then the effect is undesirable or even catastrophic. This means that the worst-case execution time (WCET) is more important than average-case execution time (ACET).
The disadvantage of SPM, when compared to cache, is that the SPM requires software management of the fast memory. In a previous student¡¦s work from our laboratory, [3], an SPM allocator was presented for WCET-targeted compilation.
Compared to that work, this current thesis make four key contributions. First, it introduces a significant amount of code infrastructure to allow library variables to be allocated to SPM. These variables turn out to represent a majority of all data accesses in many programs. Second, this provides support for allocating variables within recursive programs. Third, we support allocation of temporary variable (PC-relative addressing). Fourth, we have developed a simulator to obtain cycle-accurate information on memory behavior. In [3], the costs of allocation were not modeled, nor were the behaviors of the ARM¡¦s complex memory subsystem.
Keywords: SPM, memory allocation, memory modeling, library variables, WCET
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0209112-190129 |
| Date | 09 February 2012 |
| Creators | Fang, Hsin-Jan |
| Contributors | Chung-Nan Lee, Steve W. Haga, CHUN-HUNG RICHARD LIN |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0209112-190129 |
| Rights | user_define, Copyright information available at source archive |
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