Making worst case execution time analysis for hard real-time tasks on state of the art processors feasible

In the development of embedded hard real-time systems the ability to guarantee worst case execution times is gaining importance and complexity. The fast evolving processor acceleration techniques constantly increase the gap between a processor which uses the accelerations and one which does not. Modeling cache, pipelines and other parts of the processor gets increasingly difficult and time consuming. To circumvent this problem especially in the domain of rapid prototyping of embedded hard real-time systems, we propose to lay more weight on measurement and less on modeling. By analyzing the control flow graph the compiler uses for optimization, a reduced control flow graph can be generated, which limits the paths to be measured. Using this information the object code of the program is being instrumented and then measured. By measuring all paths the reduced control flow graph indicates, predictability is achieved without using too pessimistic estimations.