HashTAG With CALM: Low-Overhead Hardware Support for Inter-Task Eviction Monitoring

[EN] Multicore processors have emerged as the preferred architecture for safetycritical systems due to their significant performance advantages. However, concurrent access by multiple cores to a shared cache induces intercore evictions that generate nondeterministic interference and compromise timin...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Andreu-Cerezo, Pablo|||0000-0003-2070-9271, López Rodríguez, Pedro Juan|||0000-0003-4544-955X, Hernández Luz, Carles|||0000-0003-1192-6223
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2026
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/232318
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/232318
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Interference
Multicore processing
Timing
Monitoring
Hardware
Proposals
Costs
Accuracy
Safety
Prevention and mitigation
QoS
Network on chip
Multicore
09.- Desarrollar infraestructuras resilientes, promover la industrialización inclusiva y sostenible, y fomentar la innovación
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Multicore processors have emerged as the preferred architecture for safetycritical systems due to their significant performance advantages. However, concurrent access by multiple cores to a shared cache induces intercore evictions that generate nondeterministic interference and compromise timing predictability. Static partitioning of the cache among cores is a wellestablished countermeasure that effectively eliminates such evictions but reduces flexibility and system throughput. To accurately estimate inter-core cache contention, Auxiliary Tag Directories (ATDs) are widely adopted. However, ATDs incur substantial hardware area costs, which often motivates the use of heuristic-based reductions. These reduced ATD designs, while more compact, compromise accuracy and therefore are not suitable for safety-critical domains. This paper extends the proposal of HashTAG, a novel approach to accurately upper-bound inter-core eviction interference. HashTAG introduces a safe and lightweight Auxiliary Tag Directory mechanism that tracks which cores are responsible for evicting cache lines used by others, thus measuring contention. We further refine the proposed HashTAG approach by creating CALM, a custom-made memory allocator that significantly improves HashTAG performance in multicore systems. Our results show that no inter-task interference underprediction is possible with HashTAG, making it suitable for the safety domain. HashTAG provides a 47% reduction in the Auxiliary Tag Directory area, presenting perfect measurements on 80% of cases and only a 1% error on maximum inter-core eviction measurements for a HashTAG tag size of ten bits.