Institute of Embedded Systems

Note: hfalk, ESD, WCC

Abstract: Code positioning is a well-known compiler optimization aiming at the improvement of the instruction cache behavior. A contiguous mapping of code fragments in memory avoids overlapping of cache sets and thus decreases the number of cache conflict misses.<br /> We present a novel cache-aware code positioning optimization driven by worst-case execution time (WCET) information. For this purpose, we introduce a formal cache model based on a conflict graph which is able to capture a broad class of cache architectures. This cache model is combined with a formal WCET timing model, resulting in a cache conflict graph weighted with WCET data. This conflict graph is then exploited by heuristics for code positioning of both basic blocks and entire functions.<br /> Code positioning is able to decrease the accumulated cache misses for a total of 18 real-life benchmarks by 15.5% on average for an automotive processor featuring a 2-way set-associative cache. These cache miss reductions translate to average WCET reductions by 6.1%. For direct-mapped caches, even larger savings of 18.8% (cache misses) and 9.0% (WCET) were achieved.