Data re-allocation enabled cache locking for embedded systems

Keni Qiu, Mengying Zhao, Chenchen Fu, Chun Jason Xue

Abstract: Cache locking is a cache management technique to preclude the replacement of locked contents. Recently, instruction cache locking has been applied to improve average-case execution time (ACET). However, we observe that the prior instruction cache locking method shows very limited performance improve-ment for data cache. The main reason lies in that, data access similarity in data memory blocks is weaker than that in code memory blocks. This paper proposes a data re-allocation enabled cache locking approach which can significantly enhance locking efficiency for data cache and thus improve system performance. The experimental results show that with the proposed approach, on average, the miss rate is reduced by 9.1% and execution cycles are reduced by 9.4% across a suite of benchmarks.