Lock synchronization overheadsmay be significant in a shared-memory multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (SoC)implementation. These overheads are observed in terms of lock latency, lockdelay and memory bandwidth consumption in the system. There has been muchprevious work to speedup access of lock variables via specialized caches [1],software queues [2]–[5] and delayed loops, e.g., exponential backoff [2]. However, in the context of SoC, these previously reported techniquesall have drawbacks not present in our technique. We present a novel, efficient,small and very simple hardware unit, SoC Lock Cache (SoCLC), which resolvesthe critical section (CS) interactions among multiple processors and improvesthe performance criteria in terms of lock latency, lock delay and bandwidthconsumption in a shared-memory multiprocessor SoC. Our mechanism is capableof handling short CSs as well as long CSs. This combined support has beenestablished at both the hardware architecture level and the software architecturelevel including the real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel level facilities(such as support for preemptive versus non-preemptive synchronization, schedulingof lock variable accesses, interrupt handling and RTOS initialization). Theexperimental results of a microbenchmark program, which simulates an applicationwith high-contention critical section accesses under a four-processor platformwith shared-memory, showed an overall speedup of 55%. Furthermore, a databaseapplication example with client–server pairs of tasks,run on the same platform, showed that our mechanism achieved an overall speedupof 27%.

Lock synchronization - multiprocessor - RTOS - shared-memory - SoC - synchronization