Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

6.4. Modeling Shared Resources

Processes and communication activities share the MPSoC resources to which they are mapped.

6.4.1. Resource Sharing Principle and Impact

Resource sharing requires resource arbitration, i.e., scheduling, and context switching. Scheduling strategies can be divided into

• Static order versus dynamic order scheduling and

• Preemptive scheduling (interrupt) or non-preemptive (“run-to-completion”) scheduling.

Context switching implies overhead. On a processing element, pipeline states and register contents must be saved and restored, and caches must be (partially) flushed. On a communication element, context switch includes all bus arbitration overhead. Context switch overhead in memory access is usually negligible since modern ...