DTS: Using Dynamic Time-Slice Scaling to Address the OS Problem Incurred by DVFS

Abstract

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been the most useful technology to reduce power consumption, but it causes unpredictable program performance decreasing and unfair performance sharing among threads, which may render performance analysis, optimization, and isolation extremely difficult and lead to thread starvation and priority inversion. This paper firstly proposes an OS scheduler based on dynamic time-slice scaling (DTS) to address the OS problem incurred by DVFS. The DTS scheduler dynamically allocates each thread with a time-slice according to threads' behavior characteristic and processor's frequency. There are two main contributions: 1) this paper is the first work to analyze and address the OS problems incurred by DVFS, 2) we firstly allocate threads' time-slice according to threads' behavior characteristic and processor's frequency. Experimental results demonstrate our DTS scheduler can well solve most OS problems incurred by DVFS with little cost, and at the same time DTS improves system performance.