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CacheFlow: Using Maximum Flow to Bound Cache-Based Preemption Delays

Authors Tiancheng He , Bryan C. Ward

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LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.13.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • General and reference → General conference proceedings
Keywords
  • Cache-related Preemption Delay
  • Real-Time Systems
  • Maximum Flow

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Abstract

Cache-related preemption delay (CRPD) analysis bounds the additional execution time caused by cache evictions during preemptions. Tightly bounding CRPDs is challenging as there are many possible preemption patterns that can occur at runtime, and thus there has been continuous work over three decades to refine these bounds. This paper presents CacheFlow, a framework that formulates total CRPD as a maximum-flow problem. In the flow network, nodes and edge capacities can be constructed to model certain eviction patterns that can occur. Therefore, by (safely) removing nodes or edges, or reducing edge capacities, tighter CRPD bounds can be derived. This is demonstrated with different CacheFlow refinements, some of which include insights from prior analyses, as well as a refinement for simply periodic systems. An iterative max-flow formulation is also described to more efficiently integrate the max-flow solving in the context of standard fixed-priority response-time analysis. Experiments on synthetic task systems demonstrate significant schedulability improvements across a range of system configurations, while also having reasonable solving times.

Cite As Get BibTex

Tiancheng He and Bryan C. Ward. CacheFlow: Using Maximum Flow to Bound Cache-Based Preemption Delays. In 38th European Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 375, pp. 13:1-13:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.13

Author Details

Tiancheng He
  • Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
Bryan C. Ward
  • Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Supplementary Materials

References

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