A Homogeneous Architecture for Power Policy Integration in Operating Systems

A significant volume of research has concentrated on operating system (OS)-directed power management. The primary focus of previous research has been the development of better policies. In this paper, we provide evidence that one policy may outperform another under different conditions. Hence, it is difficult, or even impossible, to design the "best" policy for all computers. We explain how to select the best policies at runtime without user or administrator intervention by using a software framework called the homogeneous architecture for power policy integration (HAPPI). This architecture is portable across different platforms running Linux. HAPPI specifies common requirements for policies and provides an interface to simplify the implementation of policies in a commodity OS. Our approach allows these policies to be compared simultaneously to select the best policy among a set of distinct policies at runtime. Experimental results indicate that HAPPI achieves energy savings within 4 percent of the best individual policy for each device in several computing systems without a priori knowledge of workloads.