Evaluation of Automatic Flow Analysis for WCET Calculation on Industrial Real-Time System Code

• Published in: 2008 Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems pp. 331 - 340
• Main Authors: Barkah, Dani, Ermedahl, Andreas, Gustafsson, Jan, Lisper, Björn, Sandberg, Christer
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2008
• Subjects: Annotations; case study; Codes; embedded real-time systems; Hardware; Mathematical models; measurements; Operating systems; Production; Real-time systems; Software; static analysis; Timing; Upper bound; WCET analysis
• ISBN: 9780769532981; 0769532985
• ISSN: 1068-3070
• DOI: 10.1109/ECRTS.2008.37

A static Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) ana-lysis derives upper bounds for the execution times ofprograms. Such analysis requires information about thepossible program ows. The current practice is to provide this information manually, which can be laboriousand error-prone. An alternative is to derive this information through an automated ow analysis.In this article, we present a case study where an automatic ow analysis method was tested on industrialreal-time system code. The same code was the subject ofan earlier WCET case study, where it was analysed using manual annotations for the ow information. Thepurpose of the current study was to see to which extentthe same ow information could be found automatically. The results show that for the most part this isindeed possible, and we could derive comparable WCETestimates using the automatically generated ow information. In addition, valuable insights were gained onwhat is needed to make ow analysis methods work onreal production code.