Understanding the memory consumption of the MiBench embedded benchmark

Abstract

Complex embedded systems today commonly involve a mix of real-time and best-effort applications. The recent emergence of small low-cost commodity multi-core processors raises the possibility of running both kinds of applications on a single machine, with virtualization ensuring that the best-effort applications cannot steal CPU cycles from the real-time applications. Nevertheless, memory contention can introduce other sources of delay, that can lead to missed deadlines. In this paper, we analyze the sources of memory consumption for the real-time applications found in the MiBench embedded benchmark suite.