• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.8
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• pp.367-376
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• 2007

In this paper, we introduce an application-specific and adaptive power management technique for portable systems that support dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). We exploit both the idle time of multitasking systems running soft real-time tasks as well as memory- or CPU-bound code regions. Detailed power and execution time profiles guide an adaptive power manager (APM) that is linked to the operating system. A post-pass optimizer marks candidate regions for DVS by inserting calls to the APM. At runtime, the APM monitors the CPU's performance counters to dynamically determine the affinity of the each marked region. for each region, the APM computes the optimal voltage and frequency setting in terms of energy consumption and switches the CPU to that setting during the execution of the region. Idle time is exploited by monitoring system idle time and switching to the energy-wise most economical setting without prolonging execution. We show that our method is most effective for periodic workloads such as video or audio decoding. We have implemented our method in a multitasking operating system (Microsoft Windows CE) running on an Intel XScale-processor. We achieved up to 9% of total system power savings over the standard power management policy that puts the CPU in a low Power mode during idle periods.