Routine based OS-aware microprocessor resource adaptation for run-time operating system power saving

The increasingly constrained power budget of today's microprocessor has resulted in a situation where power savings of all components in a system have to be taken into consideration. The operating system (OS) is a major power consumer in many modem applications execution. This paper advocates a routine based OS-aware microprocessor resource adaptation mechanism targeting run-time OS power savings. Simulation results show that compared with the existing sampling-based adaptation schemes, this novel methodology yields more attractive power and performance trade-off on the OS execution. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the power saving issue of the OS itself, an increasingly important area that has been largely overlooked in the previous studies.