Forming Virtual Traces for WCET Analysis and Reduction

It is notoriously difficult to model superscalar out-of-order CPUs for the purposes of worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, which can mean that simpler CPUs must be used in hard real-time systems. To address this problem, it has been suggested that traces could be used to capture the timing properties of a complex CPU operation scheduler as it runs a sequence of basic blocks. In previous work, traces have been implemented using application-specific microcode. This paper proposes restrictions to a dynamic superscalar out-of-order CPU to implement virtual traces. These have the same timing properties as the traces in previous work, but microcode is not used. Instead, CPU modifications implement the same functionality. This allows traces to be used throughout a program because space requirements are minimal. To take advantage of this, a new allocation algorithm is proposed and evaluated for virtual traces.