A method for bounding the effect of DMA I/O interference on program execution time

摘要

[[abstract]]A DMA controller that operates in the cycle-stealing mode transfers data by `stealing' bus cycles from an executing program. This cycle stealing operation retards the progress of the executing program and extends its execution time. In this paper we first present a method that bounds the worst-case execution time of a program executing concurrently with a cycle-stealing DMA I/O operation in the simple case where the execution time of each machine instruction is fixed. We next extend this method to deal with the case of instruction-cache architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods by the results of simulations of several programs.