A non-intrusive, operating system independent spinlock profiler for embedded multicore systems

Lin Li, Philipp Wagner, Albrecht Mayer, Thomas Wild, Andreas Herkersdorf

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Locks are widely used as a synchronization method to guarantee the mutual exclusion for accesses to shared resources in multi-core embedded systems. They have been studied for years to improve performance, fairness, predictability etc. and a variety of lock implementations optimized for different scenarios have been proposed. In practice, applying an appropriate lock type to a specific scenario is usually based on the developer's hypothesis, which could mismatch the actual situation. A wrong lock type applied may result in lower performance and unfairness. Thus, a lock profiling tool is needed to increase the system transparency and guarantee the proper lock usage. In this paper, an operating-system-independent lock profiling approach is proposed as there are many different operating systems in the embedded field. This approach detects lock acquisition and lock releasing using hardware tracing based on hardware-level spinlock characteristics instead of specific libraries or APIs. The spinlocks are identified automatically; lock profiling statistics can be measured and performance-harmful lock behaviors are detected. With this information, the lock usage can be improved by the software developer. A prototype as a Java tool was implemented to conduct hardware tracing and analyze locks inside applications running on the Infineon AURIX microcontrollers.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2017 Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages322-325
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9783981537093
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 May 2017
Event20th Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE 2017 - Swisstech, Lausanne, Switzerland
Duration: 27 Mar 201731 Mar 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2017 Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE 2017

Conference

Conference20th Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE 2017
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CitySwisstech, Lausanne
Period27/03/1731/03/17

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