Title
A non-intrusive, operating system independent spinlock profiler for embedded multicore systems.
Abstract
Locks are widely used as a synchronization method to guarantee the mutual exclusion for accesses to shared resources in multi-core embedded systems. They have been studied for years to improve performance, fairness, predictability etc. and a variety of lock implementations optimized for different scenarios have been proposed. In practice, applying an appropriate lock type to a specific scenario is usually based on the developer's hypothesis, which could mismatch the actual situation. A wrong lock type applied may result in lower performance and unfairness. Thus, a lock profiling tool is needed to increase the system transparency and guarantee the proper lock usage. In this paper, an operating-system-independent lock profiling approach is proposed as there are many different operating systems in the embedded field. This approach detects lock acquisition and lock releasing using hardware tracing based on hardware-level spinlock characteristics instead of specific libraries or APIs. The spinlocks are identified automatically; lock profiling statistics can be measured and performance-harmful lock behaviors are detected. With this information, the lock usage can be improved by the software developer. A prototype as a Java tool was implemented to conduct hardware tracing and analyze locks inside applications running on the Infineon AURIX microcontrollers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.23919/DATE.2017.7927009
DATE
Keywords
Field
DocType
multicore embedded systems,lock profiling tool,developer hypothesis,system transparency,operating-system-independent lock profiling approach,lock acquisition detection,hardware-level spinlock characteristics,API,lock profiling statistics,performance-harmful lock behaviors,Java tool,Infineon AURIX microcontrollers
Computer science,Lock (computer science),Profiling (computer programming),Distributed lock manager,Read-copy-update,Real-time computing,Spinlock,Mutual exclusion,Giant lock,Operating system,Tracing,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1530-1591
978-1-5090-5826-6
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lin Li1131.67
Philipp Wagner2135.15
Albrecht Mayer3355.41
Thomas Wild4214.86
Andreas Herkersdorf570388.32