Hardware prediction of OS run-length for fine-grained resource customization

—In the past ten years, computer architecture has seen a paradigm shift from emphasizing single thread performance to energy efficient, throughput oriented, chip multiprocessors. Several studies have suggested that it may be worthwhile to offload execution of the operating system (OS) to one or more of these cores, or reconfigure hardware during OS execution. To be effective, these techniques must balance the cost of offloading or re-configuration, versus the potential benefits, which are typically unknown at decision time. These decision points are typically implemented by manually instrumenting a few OS routines (out of hundreds). Such a preliminary research effort cannot be sustained across several operating systems and hardware configurations. We argue that decisions made in software are often sub-optimal because they are expensive in terms of run-time overhead and because applications vary in their use of OS features. We propose that these decision mechanisms should be supp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: David Nellans, Kshitij Sudan, Rajeev Balasubramonian, Erik Brunvand
• Keywords: ISPASS 2010, OS Execution, OS Intensive Applications, OS Run-length Predictor, Software Engineering