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

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 (7× 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.