Collaborative operating system and compiler power management for real-time applications

Managing energy consumption has become vitally important to battery operated portable and embedded systems. A dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technique reduces the processor's dynamic power consumption quadratically at the expense of linearly decreasing the performance. Reducing energy using DVS in the context of real-time systems should consider this tradeoff. In this paper, we introduce a novel collaborative approach between the compiler and the operating system (OS) that uses fine-grained information about the execution times of a real-time application to reduce energy consumption: We use the compiler to annotate an application's source code with path-dependent information called power management hints (PMHs). This information captures the temporal behavior of the application, which varies by executing different paths. During program execution, the OS periodically changes the processor's frequency and voltage based on the temporal information provided by the PMHs. These speed adaptation points are called power management points (PMPs). We evaluate our scheme using two embedded applications: a video decoder and an automatic target recognition application. Our scheme shows an energy reduction of up to 79% over no power management and up to 50% over a static power management scheme.