A memory management approach based on page coloring for multi-core systems

Most multi-core platforms currently adopt shared cache among the processor cores. Due to the problem of cache contention, it is extremely difficult to predict the worst-case execution time of the computation tasks running on different cores. A page-coloring technique was proposed to avoid cache contention in memory access for multi-core platforms. The advantage is that the worst case execution time of tasks running on individual core can be estimated separately using the existing WCET analysis methods for uni-processor systems. A memory management system was designed based on the Linux to support page coloring mechanism, which is evaluated using the standard benchmarks. Experimental results shown that the execution time for different processor cores becomes deterministic when it is executed on the same platform running in the Linux supported with the management system.