Operating System Services for Task-Specific Power Management - Novel Approaches to Energy - Aware Embedded Linux

Download or read book Operating System Services for Task-Specific Power Management - Novel Approaches to Energy - Aware Embedded Linux written by Andreas Weifel and published by VDM Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobile computing devices like PDAs, cell phones or laptops have become an indispensable part of everyday's life. As these systems are battery-powered and the user expects long operating times, energy-aware operation is crucial. Hardware components for mobile devices offer low-power operating modes that achieve energy savings at the cost of degraded performance or application quality, e.g., by reducing the CPU speed. This dissertation investigates software-controlled energy management and addresses these two, often conflicting goals: increasing the embedded system's runtime by saving energy and providing sufficient application quality. With a cooperative approach between the operating system and individual applications or the user, task-specific trade-offs between these goals can be made. Prototype implementations for embedded Linux are presented and evaluated with energy measurements, proving the feasibility of task-specific power management. This dissertation has a strong practical focus, being a valuable guide for computer scientists and software engineers both in academia and industry who deal with operating system design and low-power software architectures.