Improving Energy Efficiency On Asymmetric Multiprocessing Systems - P. McKenney, IBM
Channel: Linux Plumbers Conference
Date: 08/10/2013

As battery-powered embedded devices move towards multicore processors, multicore energy efficiency is becoming critically important. To this end, ARM recently announced its big.LITTLE architecture, featuring a multicore chip with both high-performance processors and high-efficiency processors running a single instance of the Linux operating system. Prior work has shown the benefits of running performance-critical code on the high-performance processors, while confining other processing to the high-efficiency processors. This paper builds on this work by showing that for some important mobile workloads, pre-existing Linux-kernel tuning parameters originally designed for real time, high-performance computing, and SMP energy efficiency can further reduce the amount of non-performance-critical code running on the high-performance processors, resulting in energy efficiency gains in excess of 10%. http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2013/