Accelerating Full-System Simulation through Characterizing and Predicting Operating System Performance

The ongoing trend of increasing computer hardware and software complexity has resulted in the increase in complexity and overheads of cycle-accurate processor system simulation, especially in full-system simulation which not only simulates user applications, but also the Operating System (OS) and system libraries. This paper seeks to address how to accelerate full-system simulation through studying, characterizing, and predicting the performance behavior of OS services. Through studying the performance behavior of OS services, we found that each OS service exhibits multiple but limited behavior points that are repeated frequently. OS services also exhibit application-specific performance behavior and largely irregular patterns of occurrences. We exploit the observation to speed up full system simulation. A simulation run is divided into two nonoverlapping periods: a learning period in which performance behavior of instances of an OS service are characterized and recorded, and a predi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Seongbeom Kim, Fang Liu, Yan Solihin, Ravi R. Iyer, Li Zhao, W. Cohen
• Keywords: ISPASS 2007, Os Service, Performance Behavior, Simulation, Software Engineering