LP-ECOS: An Energy Efficient RTOS

Acquaviva, Andrea ; Simunic, Tajana ; Benini, Luca

HP Development Company

关键词: low-power;    operating system;    application driven;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2003-81

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

In this report we present an energy efficient implementation of a commercial-strength operating system (ECOS) running on a real-life hardware platform (HP SmartBadge IV). We integrate into the OS a power manager module that cooperates with the applications and power-aware device drivers through a set of APIs. The power manager makes decisions on power states of various system components, and sets processor clock frequency dynamically. We tested our RTOS implementation in single and multiple task environments. We used typical streaming multimedia applications that exploit wireless network and audio resources. Measurements obtained on MP3 audio decoder and other signal processing algorithms show that the whole system energy can be reduced by more than 50% with no effect on performance when using our extensions to the operating system.