Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Hard/soft realtime Reply To: Hard/soft realtime

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

Well, not quite. There is also the possibility of I$ misses. As a general rule you can’t do Hard Real Time if anything is cached.

The standard way to deal with the issue is to pin the HRT on-chip, either by pinning lines in the cache; by turning all or part of the cache into scratchpad; or by using NUMA with the HRT in an uncached but on-chip level, typically SRAM or 1T on-chip DRAM. All these approaches work as well on the Mill as for any other architecture. And perhaps somewhat better (especially if the chip is being used for both HRT and background regular apps), due to the low cost of interrupts, task switch, and inter-process security.