heechul / BWLOCK-1

A lock-like mechanism for protecting memory-critical sections of Soft Real-Time Applications

BWLOCK: memory bandwidth control API

Heechul Yun [e-mail] Waqar Ali [e-mail]

In multicore platforms, memory intensive code sections of a program can be significantly delayed by other memory intensive programs running in parallel due to memory bandwidth contention. BWLOCK provides explicit ways to mitigate memory bandwidth contention to protect performance of real-time applications without any special hardware support.

Preparation

Patch the kernel (v4.0) as follows.

   $ patch -p1 < bwlock-4.0.patch 

Configure the kernel to enable BWLOCK.

   CONFIG_BWLOCK=y

Install & boot the BWLOCK enabled kernel.

Build & install the bwlock kernel module

   $ make

This will generate the "exe" directory containing the bandwidth lock kernel module. Go into this directory and install the kernel module using the following command:

$ cd exe $ sudo insmod bwlockmod.ko

In order to remove the generated files, do the following:

$ make clean

Usage
==========

## fine-grain locking

To support fine-grain bw locking, you need to modify the program to use 
bw_lock()/bw_unlock(). 

#include "bwlock.h"

  bwlock_register (pid);

bw_lock()

  bw_unlock()

bwlock_unregister();

Publication
=============

Heechul Yun, Santosh Gondi, Siddhartha Biswas. "Protecting Memory-Performance Critical Sections in Soft Real-Time Applications," In submission. [(pdf)](http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~heechul/papers/bwlock-submitted.pdf)