Title :
A Thread Behavior-Based Memory Management Framework on Multi-core Smartphone
Author :
Zongwei Zhu ; Xi Li ; Hengchang Liu ; Cheng Ji ; Yuan Xu ; Xuehai Zhou ; Beilei Sun
Author_Institution :
Suzhou Inst. for Adv. Study, Univ. of Sci. & Technol. of China, Suzhou, China
Abstract :
Memory management systems have significantly affected the overall performance of modern multi-core smartphone systems. Android, as one of the most popular smartphone operating systems, adopts a global buddy system with the FCFS (first come, first served) principle for memory allocation, and releases requests to manage external fragmentations and maintain the memory allocation efficiency. However, extensive experimental study on thread behaviors indicates that memory external fragmentation is no longer the crucial bottleneck in most Android applications. Specifically, a thread usually allocates or releases memory in bursts, resulting in serious memory locks and inefficient memory allocation. Furthermore, the pattern of such bursting behaviors varies throughout the life cycle of a thread. The conventional FCFS policy of Android buddy system fails to adapt to such variations and thus suffers from performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel memory management framework, called Memory Management Based on Thread Behaviors (MMBTB), for multi-core smartphone systems. It adapts to various thread behaviors through targeted optimizations to provide efficient memory allocation. The efficiency and effectiveness of this new memory management scheme on multicore architecture is proved by a theoretical emulation model. Our experimental studies on the real Android system show that MMBTB can improve the efficiency of memory allocation by 12%-20%, confirming the theoretical analysis results.
Keywords :
Android (operating system); multiprocessing systems; smart phones; storage management; Android applications; Android buddy system; FCFS; MMBTB; first come first served principle; global buddy system; memory allocation; memory external fragmentation; memory management based on thread behaviors; memory management systems; multicore architecture; multicore smartphone systems; smartphone operating systems; thread behavior-based memory management framework; Androids; Humanoid robots; Instruction sets; Libraries; Memory management; Multicore processing; Resource management; Android; behaviors; memory management; smartphone; thread;
Conference_Titel :
Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS), 2014 19th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Tianjin
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-5481-0
DOI :
10.1109/ICECCS.2014.21