System-Aware Performance Monitoring Unit for RISC-V Architectures
Tobias Scheipel, Fabian Mauroner, Marcel Carsten Baunach · 2017
Due to increasing complexity of software in embedded systems, performance aspects become much more important this days. This should happen early in the development process. Often execution times and events are not easily countable or measurable due to a lack of functionality in these systems. Execution time monitoring is also relevant in terms of reacting to internal and external events dynamically. Especially for systems using multiple tasks with internal or external resource dependencies, this is a major discipline. Another problem is that measurements during the development process are often done by interfering the system as a whole. This method leads to biases in the measurement results, because the finalized system gets deployed without these interfering functionalities and can therefore work more efficiently than the development system. The scope of the present work is to develop a module in a hardware description language (HDL) which is able to measure execution times and events task-aware and unaware without interfering the system. The measurements of this module must be handed to the programmer through an easy accessible interface. The main focuses of the project are the scalability, platform independency concerning processor and operating system (OS), as well as easy extendibility. Also, reusability of counters during runtime is included in this work.