A Linux-governor based Dynamic Reliability Manager for android mobile devices

Pietro Mercati, Andrea Bartolini, Francesco Paterna, Tajana Simunic Rosing, Luca Benini

Abstract: Reliability is a major concern in multiprocessors. Dynamic Reliability Management (DRM) aims at trading off processor performance with lifetime. The state-of-the-art publications study only the theory supported by simulation. This paper presents the first complete software implementation, working on a real hardware, of a low-overhead, Android-compatible workload-aware DRM Governor for mobile multiprocessors. We discuss the design challenges and the run-time overhead involved. We show the effectiveness of our governor in guaranteeing the predefined target lifetime and show that it achieves up to 100% of lifetime improvement with respect to traditional governors, while providing comparable performance for critical applications.