Integrating Gnat/Gcc into a Timing Analysis Environment

Recent research on timing analysis has focused on static methods to predict worst-case execution times that provide safe approximations of the actual worst-case execution time of real-time tasks. Since these predictions are verifiable, they can be used in schedulability analysis so that the overall temporal behavior of tasks can be analyzed. This paper details our efforts to integrate a commonly available and widely accepted compiler, the Gnat/Gcc family, into our tool set for timing analysis. We discuss the design and implementation of our modifications to Gnat/Gcc, where we accommodated our enhancements in a widely portable way within the common back-end of Gnat and Gcc. With this work, it is our aim to make the analytical approach of static timing analysis available to the real-time community.