Trace-based analysis methodology of program flash contention in embedded multicore systems

Contention for shared resources is a major performance issue in multicore systems. In embedded multicore microcontrollers, contentions of program flash accesses have a significant performance impact, because the flash access has a large latency compared to a core clock cycle. Therefore, the detection and analysis of program flash contentions are necessary to remedy this situation. With a lack of existing tools being able to fulfill this task, a novel post-processing analysis methodology is proposed in this paper to acquire the information of program flash contentions in detail based on the non-intrusive trace. This information can be utilized to improve the overall performance and particularly to enhance the real-time performance of specific threads or functions for hard real-time multicore systems.