Locality-Aware Process Scheduling for Embedded MPSoCs

Abstract: Utilizing on-chip caches in embedded multiprocessor-system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) based systems is critical from both performance and power perspectives. While most of the prior work that targets at optimizing cache behavior are performed at hardware and compilation levels, operating system (OS) can also play major role as it sees the global access pattern information across applications. This paper proposes a cache-conscious OS process scheduling strategy based on data reuse. The proposed scheduler implements two complementary approaches. First, the processes that do not share any data between them are scheduled at different cores if it is possible to do so. Second, the processes that could not be executed at the same time (due to dependences) but share data among each other are mapped to the same processor core so that they share the cache contents. Our experimental results using this new data locality aware OS scheduling strategy are promising, and show significant improvements in task completion times.