Process Oriented Power Management

— Though modern operating systems have a capable of controlling the power consumption using the DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) mechanism, it is controlled for some duration according to the runtime statistics. Thus, some interactive process suffers its response time when the system is slowed. This paper proposes the Process-Oriented Power Management Mechanism (POPM), that controls the operating speed of each process separately, instead of some interval. When a process context switch occurs, POPM determines the most appropriate speed for the next process, and changes CPU frequency to the corresponding value. In order to determine the speed of each process, POPM analyzes the runtime information of each process: e.g., I/O and CPU usage. We develop a prototype of POPM on the Linux Kernel 2.6, and evaluate it on a Laptop PC. Our experimental result shows that POPM reduces power consumption of the system without reminding users that the system is slowed down.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SIES
• Authors: Daisuke Miyakawa, Yutaka Ishikawa
• Keywords: Embedded Systems, Modern Operating Systems, Power Consumption, Power Management Mechanism, SIES 2007