Simultaneous Multithreading in Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) enables enhanced computing capacity by allowing multiple tasks to execute concurrently on the same computing core. Despite its benefits, its use has been largely eschewed in work on real-time systems due to concerns that tasks running on the same core may adversely interfere with each other. In this paper, the safety of using SMT in a mixed-criticality multicore context is considered in detail. To this end, a prior open-source framework called MC
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(mixedcriticality on multicore), which provides features for mitigating cache and memory interference, was re-implemented to support SMT on an SMT-capable multicore platform. The creation of this new, configurable MC
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variant entailed producing the first operating-system implementations of several recently proposed real-time SMT schedulers and tying them together within a mixed-criticality context. These schedulers introduce new spatialisolation challenges, which required introducing isolation at both the L2 and L3 cache levels. The efficacy of the resulting MC
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variant is demonstrated via three experimental efforts. The first involved obtaining execution data using a wide range of benchmark suites, including TACLeBench, DIS, SD-VBS, and synthetic microbenchmarks. The second involved conducting a large-scale overhead-aware schedulability study, parameterized by the collected benchmark data, to elucidate schedulability tradeoffs. The third involved experiments involving case-study task systems. In the schedulability study, the use of SMT proved capable of increasing platform capacity by an average factor of 1.32. In the case-study experiments, deadline misses of highly critical tasks were never observed.