The Power of System Call Traces: Predicting the Software Energy Consumption Impact of Changes

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Aggarwal, K.
  • Chenlei, Z.
  • Campbell, J.
  • Hindle, Abram
  • Stroulia, E.

• Battery is a critical resource for smartphones. Software developers as the builders and maintainers of applications, are responsible for updating and deploying energy efficient applications to end users. Unfortunately, the impact of software change on energy consumption is still unclear. Estimation based on software metrics has proved difficult. As energy consumption profiling requires special infrastructure, developers have difficulty assessing the impact of their actions on energy consumption. System calls are the interface between applications and the OS kernel and provide insight into how software utilizes hardware and software resources. As profiling system calls requires no specialized infrastructure, unlike energy consumption, it is much easier for the developers to track changes to system calls. Thus we relate software change to energy consumption by tracing the changes in an application’s pattern of system call invocations. We find that significant changes to system call profiles often induce significant changes in energy consumption

• Date created

  2014

• Subjects / Keywords

  • System Calls
  • Software energy consumption
  • Energy consumption

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Presentation

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-qv6m-f341

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International