Performance Evaluation for Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling Using Runtime Performance Counters

Abstract

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is an effective technique for reducing power consumption. The system performance is not easy to evaluate through Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling. Most of studies use the execution time as an indicator while measuring the performance. However, DVFS adjusted processor speed during a fixed-length period so it cannot rely on the execution time to evaluate the system performance. This study proposes a novel and simple performance evaluation method to evaluate the system performance when DVFS is activated. Based on the performance evaluation method, this study also proposes a DVFS algorithm (P-DVFS) for a general-purpose operating system. The algorithm has been implemented on the Linux operating system and used a PXA270 development board. The results show that P-DVFS could accurately predict the suitable frequency, given runtime statistics information of a running program. In this way, the user can easily control the energy consumption by specifying allowable performance loss factor.