research-article

30 seconds is not enough!: a study of operating system timer usage

Authors:

Andrew Baumann,

Timothy Roscoe,

Rebecca IsaacsAuthors Info & Claims

Eurosys '08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008

Pages 205 - 218

https://doi.org/10.1145/1352592.1352614

Published: 01 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The basic system timer facilities used by applications and OS kernels for scheduling timeouts and periodic activities have remained largely unchanged for decades, while hardware architectures and application loads have changed radically. This raises concerns with CPU overhead power management and application responsiveness.

In this paper we study how kernel timers are used in the Linux and Vista kernels, and the instrumentation challenges and tradeoffs inherent in conducting such a study. We show how the same timer facilities serve at least five distinct purposes, and examine their performance characteristics under a selection of application workloads. We show that many timer parameters supplied by application and kernel programmers are somewhat arbitrary, and examine the potential benefit of adaptive timeouts.

We also discuss the further implications of our results, both for enhancements to the system timer functionality in existing kernels, and for the clean-slate design of a system timer subsystem for new OS kernels, including the extent to which applications might require such an interface at all.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Eurosys '08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2008

April 2008

346 pages

ISBN:9781605580135

DOI:10.1145/1352592

General Chair:
Joe Sventek
University of Glasgow, UK
,
Program Chair:
Steven Hand
University of Cambridge, UK

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 42, Issue 4
EuroSys '08
May 2008
321 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/1357010
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 April 2008

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April 1 - 4, 2008

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Davis JServant FLee D(2021)Using Selective Memoization to Defeat Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40001.2021.00032(1-17)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40001.2021.00032
Fröhlich AGracioli GSantos J(2018)Periodic timers revisitedComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2011.03.00337:3(365-375)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2011.03.003
Blin ACourtaud CSopena JLawall JMuller G(2016)Understanding the Memory Consumption of the MiBench Embedded BenchmarkNetworked Systems10.1007/978-3-319-46140-3_6(71-86)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46140-3_6
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