Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains
Lin F., Wang Z., Zhong L. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems33 (2):1-27,2015.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Jul 28 2015

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.

Reviewer:  Bayard Kohlhepp Review #: CR143657 (1510-0893)
Bookmark and Share
  Featured Reviewer  
 
Organization And Design (D.4.7 )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Organization And Design": Date
Implicit system specification and the interface equation
Shields M. The Computer Journal 32(5): 399-412, 1989. Type: Article
Nov 1 1990
Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors
Bugnion E., Devine S., Govil K., Rosenblum M. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 15(4): 412-447, 1997. Type: Article
Sep 1 1998
Operating system support for persistent and recoverable computations
Rosenberg J., Dearle A., Hulse D., Lindström A., Norris S. Communications of the ACM 39(9): 62-69, 1996. Type: Article
Mar 1 1997
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy