Playing Hare and Tortoise: The FigarOS Kernel for Fine-Grained System-Level Energy Optimizations

Energy has emerged to be the most important resource for computing systems. Despite the exceptional importance of energy, reducing its demand at application and system level remains a challenging task for programmers and engineers. This is aggravated by the fact that traditional energy-saving approaches are not only error-prone but even lead to adverse consequences (i.e. increased energy consumption). To address this concern, we present the FigarOS operating system for fine-grained system-level energy optimizations. The evaluation of our FigarOS implementation shows that the operating system lowers the energy consumption of processes by up to 2.9 x.