Thread Evolution Kit for Optimizing Thread Operations on CE/IoT Devices

Abstract

Most modern operating systems have adopted the one-to-one thread model to support fast execution of threads in both multi-core and single-core systems. This thread model, which maps the kernel-space and user-space threads in a one-to-one manner, supports quick thread creation and termination in high-performance server environments. However, the performance of time-critical threads is degraded when multiple threads are being run in low-end CE devices with limited system resources. When a CE device runs many threads to support diverse application functionalities, low-level hardware specifications often lead to significant resource contention among the threads trying to obtain system resources. As a result, the operating system encounters challenges, such as excessive thread context switching overhead, execution delay of time-critical threads, and a lack of virtual memory for thread stacks. This article proposes a state-of-the-art Thread Evolution Kit (TEK) that consists of three primary components: a CPU Mediator, Stack Tuner, and Enhanced Thread Identifier. From the experiment, we can see that the proposed scheme significantly improves user responsiveness (7x faster) under high CPU contention compared to the traditional thread model. Also, TEK solves the segmentation fault problem that frequently occurs when a CE application increases the number of threads during its execution.