• DOI:10.1145/3534879.3534888
• Corpus ID: 247596732

RT-Bench: an Extensible Benchmark Framework for the Analysis and Management of Real-Time Applications

@article{Nicolella2022RTBenchAE,
  title={RT-Bench: an Extensible Benchmark Framework for the Analysis and Management of Real-Time Applications},
  author={Mattia Nicolella and Shahin Roozkhosh and Denis Hoornaert and Andrea Bastoni and Renato Mancuso},
  journal={Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems},
  year={2022}
}

• Mattia Nicolella, Shahin Roozkhosh, +2 authors R. Mancuso
• Published 22 March 2022
• Computer Science
• Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems

Benchmarking is crucial for testing and validating any system, including—and perhaps especially—real-time systems. Typical real-time applications adhere to well-understood abstractions: they exhibit a periodic behavior, operate on a well-defined working set, and strive for stable response time, avoiding non-predicable factors such as page faults. Unfortunately, available benchmark suites fail to reflect key characteristics of real-time applications. Practitioners and researchers must resort to either benchmark heavily approximated real-time environments or re-engineer available benchmarks to add—if possible—the sought-after features. Additionally, the measuring and logging capabilities provided by most benchmark suites are not tailored “out-of-the-box” to real-time environments, and changing basic parameters such as the scheduling policy often becomes a tiring and error-prone exercise. In this paper, we present RT-bench, an open-source framework adding standard real-time features to virtually any existing benchmark. Furthermore, RT-bench provides an easy-to-use, unified command-line interface to customize key aspects of the real-time execution of a set of benchmarks. Our framework is guided by four main criteria: 1) cohesive interface, 2) support for periodic application behavior and deadline semantics, 3) controllable memory footprint, and 4) extensibility and portability. We have integrated within the framework applications from the widely used SD-VBS and IsolBench suites. We showcase a set of use-cases that are representative of typical real-time system evaluation scenarios, and that can be easily conducted via RT-Bench.