Newly emerging multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) platforms provide hard processing cores with programmable logic (PL) for high-performance computing applications. In this article, we take a deep look into these commercially available heterogeneous platforms and show how to design mixed-criticality applications such that different processing components can be isolated to avoid contention on the shared resources such as last-level cache and main memory. Our approach involves software/hardware co-design to achieve isolation between the different criticality domains. At the hardware level, we use a scratchpad memory (SPM) with dedicated interfaces inside the PL to avoid conflicts in the main memory. At the software level, we employ a hypervisor to support cache-coloring such that conflicts at the shared L2 cache can be avoided. In order to move the tasks in/out of the SPM memory, we rely on a DMA engine and propose a new CPU-DMA co-scheduling policy, called Lazy Load , for which we also derive the response time analysis. The results of a case study on image processing demonstrate that the contention on the shared memory subsystem can be avoided when running with our proposed architecture. Moreover, comprehensive schedulability evaluations show that the newly proposed Lazy Load policy outperforms the existing CPU-DMA scheduling approaches and is effective in mitigating the main memory interference in our proposed architecture.

The management of shared hardware resources in multi-core platforms has been characterized by a fundamental trade-off: high-performance arbiters typically employed in COTS systems offer no worst-case guarantees, while dedicated real-time controllers provide timing guarantees at the cost of significantly degrading system performance. In this paper, we overcome this trade-off by introducing Duetto, a novel hardware resource management paradigm. Duetto pairs a real-time arbiter with a high-performance arbiter and a latency estimator module. Based on the observation that the resource is rarely overloaded, Duetto executes the high-performance arbiter most of the time, switching to the real-time arbiter only in the rare cases when the latency estimator deems that timing guarantees risk being violated. We demonstrate our approach on the case study of a multi-bank memory. Our evaluation based on cycle-accurate simulations shows that Duetto can provide the same latency guarantees as the real-time arbiter with limited loss of performance compared to the high-performance arbiter.

Worst-case execution bounds for real-time programs are profoundly impacted by the latency of accessing hardware shared resources, such as off-chip DRAM. While many different memory controller designs have been proposed in the literature, there is a trade-off between average-case performance and predictable worst-case bounds, as techniques targeted at improving the former can harm the latter and vice-versa. We find that taking advantage of pipelining between different commands can improve both, but incorporating pipelining effects in worst-case analysis is challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel DRAM controller that successfully balances performance and predictability by employing a dynamic pipelining scheme. We show that the schedule of DRAM commands is akin to a two-stage two-mode pipeline, and hence, design an easily-implementable admission rule that allows us to dynamically add requests to the pipeline without hurting worst-case bounds.

Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) integrating hard processing cores with programmable logic (PL) are becoming increasingly common. While these platforms have been originally designed for high performance computing applications, their rich feature set can be exploited to efficiently implement mixed criticality domains serving both critical hard real-time tasks, as well as soft real-time tasks. In this paper, we take a deep look at commercially available heterogeneous MPSoCs that incorporate PL and a multicore processor. We show how one can tailor these processors to support a mixed criticality system, where cores are strictly isolated to avoid contention on shared resources such as Last-Level Cache (LLC) and main memory. In order to avoid conflicts in last-level cache, we propose the use of cache coloring, implemented in the Jailhouse hypervisor. In addition, we employ ScratchPad Memory (SPM) inside the PL to support a multi-phase execution model for real-time tasks that avoids conflicts in shared memory. We provide a full-stack, working implementation on a latest-generation MPSoC platform, and show results based on both a set of data intensive tasks, as well as a case study based on an image processing benchmark application.