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Towards a Responsive, Yet Power-ef.cient, Operating System: A Holistic Approach
Atlanta, Georgia September 27-September 29
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MASCOT.2005.7413th IEEE International Symposium on ...
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Le Yan, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Lin Zhong, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Niraj K. Jha, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University

Although computing hardware has become increasingly more powerful, computer responsiveness is still an important issue due to multi-tasking and software bloat. We propose a holistic approach for improving computer responsiveness through user focus-aware resource management for CPU, memory, disk I/O, and graphics processing. Previous approaches only address one or two of these problems simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to address disk I/O scheduling for better responsiveness. It also offers better solutions for the other problems. We also exploit the user-perceived latency to perform dynamic voltage scaling of the CPU to reduce power consumption at run-time without sacrificing responsiveness. We implemented our approach in the Linux/X Window system (henceforth referred to as Linux/X) on an IBM Thinkpad R32 laptop with mobile Pentium 4- M processor, which has two performance levels with different frequency/supply voltage settings: high (30.0W at 1.8GHz/1.3V) and low (20.8W at 1.2GHz/1.2V). Experimental results show that user focus-aware resource management achieves a significant improvement in computer responsiveness and some in energy efficiency. For example, for TuxRacer, a video racing game, with GpsDrive, a navigation system, running in the background, it provides a reduction of 42.0% in user-perceived latency and 7.5% in energy consumption with respect to the Linux/X system.

Citation:
Le Yan, Lin Zhong, Niraj K. Jha, "Towards a Responsive, Yet Power-ef.cient, Operating System: A Holistic Approach," mascots, pp.249-257, 13th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 2005
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