An Empirical Study on the Adequacy of MBPTA for Tasks Executed on a Complex Computer Architecture with Linux

In order to support the computational demand of Real-Time Systems' (RTSs`) applications, the use of complex hardware will be fundamental. This fact makes analysis of software to derive Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) an increasingly harder challenge. State-of-the-art WCET analysis techniques are hampered by the ever-growing cost and complexity of obtaining accurate knowledge of the internal operation of advanced processors, and by difficulties in reliably associating variable execution times with tasks' worst-case behaviour through measurement-based techniques. In this work, we performed an empirical assessment of the adequacy of Measurement-Based Probabilistic Timing Analysis (MBPTA) to estimate the pWCET - through Extreme Value Theory (EVT) - of a task executed on a complex computer architecture with Linux. The proposed evaluation has the objective of detecting whether EVT can be deemed suitable for determining pWCET estimates for tasks executed on complex computers.