Transforming Execution-Time Boundable Code into Temporally Predictable Code

Traditional Worst-Case Execution-Time (WCET) analysis is very complex. It has to deal with path analysis, to identify and describe the possible execution paths through the code to be analyzed, and it has to model the worst-case timing of the possible paths on the target hardware. The latter is again nontrivial due to interference of modern hardware features like instruction pipelines, caches, and parallel instruction-execution units on the processor. To simplify WCET analysis we have proposed a new programming paradigm, single-path programming. Every program following this paradigm has only a single possible execution path, which makes path analysis and thus WCET analysis almost trivial. In this work we show how any real-time program code that is WCET-analyzable can be transformed into single-path code. This demonstrates that the single-path paradigm provides a universal solution to simplify WCET analysis.