Koala: a platform for OS-level power management

Managing the power consumption of computing platforms is a complicated problem thanks to a multitude of hardware configuration options and characteristics. Much of the academic research is based on unrealistic assumptions, and has, therefore, seen little practical uptake. We provide an overview of the difficulties facing power management schemes when used in real systems. We present Koala, a platform which uses a precharacterised model at run-time to predict the performance and energy consumption of a piece of software. An arbitrary policy can then be applied in order to dynamically trade performance and energy consumption. We have implemented this system in a recent Linux kernel, and evaluated it by running a variety of benchmarks on a number of different platforms. Under some conditions, we observe energy savings of 30% for a 4% performance loss. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.8 [ Operating Systems ]: Performance Modelling and prediction General Terms Design, Experimentati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: David C. Snowdon, Etienne Le Sueur, Stefan M. Petters, Gernot Heiser
• Keywords: Energy Consumption, EUROSYS 2009, Measurement Keywords Power, Power Consumption, System Software