Cache Sharing and Isolation Tradeoffs in Multicore Mixed-Criticality Systems

In mixed-critical applications, tension exists between sharing and isolation with respect to hardware resources: while strong isolation might be required for highly critical tasks, somewhat permissive sharing might be reasonable for less critical tasks to improve throughput or average-case performance. In this paper, this tension is examined as it pertains to shared last-level caches (LLCs) on multicore platforms. In particular, criticality-aware optimization techniques based on linear programming are presented for allocating LLC areas in the context of the previously proposed MC2 (mixed-criticality on multicore) framework. Experiments are also presented that show that these techniques can result in significant schedulability improvements.