research-article

K2: A Mobile Operating System for Heterogeneous Coherence Domains

Authors:

Felix Xiaozhu Lin,

Lin ZhongAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), Volume 33, Issue 2

Article No.: 4, Pages 1 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/2699676

Published: 08 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile System-on-Chips (SoC) that incorporate heterogeneous coherence domains promise high energy efficiency to a wide range of mobile applications, yet are difficult to program. To exploit the architecture, a desirable, yet missing capability is to replicate operating system (OS) services over multiple coherence domains with minimum inter-domain communication. In designing such an OS, we set three goals: to ease application development, to simplify OS engineering, and to preserve the current OS performance. To this end, we identify a shared-most OS model for multiple coherence domains: creating per-domain instances of core OS services with no shared state, while enabling other extended OS services to share state across domains. To test the model, we build K2, a prototype OS on the TI OMAP4 SoC, by reusing most of the Linux 3.4 source. K2 presents a single system image to applications with its two kernels running on top of the two coherence domains of OMAP4. The two kernels have independent instances of core OS services, such as page allocation and interrupt management, as coordinated by K2; the two kernels share most extended OS services, such as device drivers, whose state is kept coherent transparently by K2. Despite platform constraints and unoptimized code, K2 improves energy efficiency for light OS workloads by 8x-10x, while incurring less than 9% performance overhead for two device drivers shared between kernels. Our experiences with K2 show that the shared-most model is promising.

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Index Terms

K2: A Mobile Operating System for Heterogeneous Coherence Domains
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems

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K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains
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Mobile System-on-Chips (SoC) that incorporate heterogeneous coherence domains promise high energy efficiency to a wide range of mobile applications, yet are difficult to program. To exploit the architecture, a desirable, yet missing capability is to ...
K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains
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Mobile System-on-Chips (SoC) that incorporate heterogeneous coherence domains promise high energy efficiency to a wide range of mobile applications, yet are difficult to program. To exploit the architecture, a desirable, yet missing capability is to ...
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Reviews

Reviewer: Bayard Kohlhepp

Power management is the unsung hero of mobile computing and the limiting frontier of future mobile technology. Improvements in energy usage will expand our horizons past mobile through wearable and on to implantable technology, but first we have to lose the battery. The K2 operating system (OS) is an incremental advance in reduced energy consumption. New mobile system-on-chips (SoCs) are divided into full-power and reduced-power sections ("coherence domains") in order to consume less power, but assigning software to the proper domain is difficult. So is communication and movement between those domains as applications change state. K2 simplifies the programming of multiple coherence domains while preserving performance. According to the authors, overhead on their TI OMAP4 SoC was kept to a six percent penalty while light workloads were energy-optimized by a factor of ten (read the paper for specifics). The authors created this new OS with three goals in mind: ease application development, simplify OS engineering, and preserve performance. They chose a shared-most model where kernel services are replicated in each coherence domain. This means kernel services look the same to programmers regardless of assigned domain, effectively making domains invisible. Programmers don't have to code energy awareness. K2 works like any old Linux system with only a minor performance hit, satisfying all of the authors' goals. K2 was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and is available for download from www.k2os.org. Work continues on K2 as the underlying SoC architectures keep advancing. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems Volume 33, Issue 2

June 2015

86 pages

ISSN:0734-2071

EISSN:1557-7333

DOI:10.1145/2785582

Editor:
Todd C. Mowry
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

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Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 08 June 2015

Accepted: 01 November 2014

Revised: 01 November 2014

Received: 01 November 2014

Published in TOCS Volume 33, Issue 2

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Cited By

Horta EChuang HVSathish NPhilippidis CBarbalace AOlivier PRavindran BZhang KGherbi AVenkatasubramanian NVeiga L(2021)Xar-trekProceedings of the 22nd International Middleware Conference10.1145/3464298.3493388(104-118)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3464298.3493388
Ku E(2021)Like a shadow: Enhancing transactions with mobile payment applicationsThe International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research10.1080/09593969.2021.200797831:5(531-548)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/09593969.2021.2007978
Balkind JLim KSchaffner MGao FChirkov GLi ALavrov ANguyen TFu YZaruba FGulati KBenini LWentzlaff DLarus JCeze LStrauss K(2020)BYOCProceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3373376.3378479(699-714)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373376.3378479
Asmussen NRoitzsch MHärtig HDan TDahlia M(2019)M3XProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358859(617-631)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
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Barbalace ALyerly RJelesnianski CCarno AChuang HLegout VRavindran B(2017)Breaking the Boundaries in Heterogeneous-ISA DatacentersACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/3093337.303773845:1(645-659)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2017
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Barbalace ALyerly RJelesnianski CCarno AChuang HLegout VRavindran B(2017)Breaking the Boundaries in Heterogeneous-ISA DatacentersACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093336.303773852:4(645-659)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2017
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Barbalace ALyerly RJelesnianski CCarno AChuang HLegout VRavindran BChen YTemam OCarter J(2017)Breaking the Boundaries in Heterogeneous-ISA DatacentersProceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3037697.3037738(645-659)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2017
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