Towards Dual-Issue Single-Path Code

Abstract

The Patmos instruction-set architecture is designed for real-time systems. As such, it has features that increase the predictability of code running on it. One important feature is its dual-issue pipeline: instructions may be organized in bundles of two that are issued and executed in parallel. This increases the throughput of the processor in a predictable manner, but only if the compiler makes use of it.Single-path code is a code-generation technique that produces predictable executions by always following the same trace of instructions. The Patmos compiler can already produce singlepath code, but it does not use the second issue slot available in the processor. This is less than ideal because the singlepath transformation results in code that has a high degree of instruction-level parallelism.In this paper, we present a single-path code generator that can produce bundled instructions. It includes generic support for bundling algorithms, such that implementing them is simple and does not require changing other parts of the compiler.We also present one such bundling algorithm plugged into the single-path code generator. With it, we show that we can produce dual-issue instructions to improve performance. Index Terms-real-time systems, time-predictable computer architecture, single-path code generation.