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DAMA: A Dual Arbitration Mechanism for Mixed-Criticality Applications

Authors Wafic Lawand , Rodolfo Pellizzoni

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Real-time system architecture
Keywords
  • Real-time Systems
  • Mixed-criticality Applications
  • Memory controllers
  • Prefetchers

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Abstract

We discuss hardware resource management in mixed-criticality systems, where requestors may issue latency-critical (LTC) and non-latency-critical (NLTC) requests. LTC requests must adhere to strict latency bounds imposed by safety-critical applications, but timely servicing NLTC requests is necessary to maximize overall system performance in the average case. In this paper, we address this tradeoff for a shared memory resource by proposing DAMA, a dual arbitration mechanism that imposes an upper bound on the cumulative latency of LTC requests without unduly impacting NLTC performance. DAMA comprises a high-performance arbiter, a real-time arbiter, and a mechanism that constantly monitors the cumulative latency of requests suffered by each requestor. DAMA primarily executes in high-performance mode and only switches to real-time mode in the rare instances when its incorporated mechanism detects a violation of a task’s timing guarantee. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our arbitration scheme by adapting a predictable prefetcher that issues NLTC requests and attaching it to the L1 caches of our cores. We show both formally and experimentally that DAMA provides timing guarantees for LTC requests while processing other NLTC requests. We also demonstrate that with a negligible overhead of less than 1.5% on the cumulative latency bound of LTC requests, DAMA can achieve an equivalent average performance to a prefetcher that processes requests under a high-performance arbitration scheme.

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Wafic Lawand and Rodolfo Pellizzoni. DAMA: A Dual Arbitration Mechanism for Mixed-Criticality Applications. In 37th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 335, pp. 9:1-9:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2025.9

Author Details

Wafic Lawand
  • University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Rodolfo Pellizzoni
  • University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Funding

This work has been supported by NSERC. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

Supplementary Materials

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