Cinder Mobile OS Lets Users Send More Power To Slow Apps 92
alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "Stanford University researchers are designing an operating system from the ground up to handle the power and security requirements of mobile devices. The Cinder operating system is already working on an Arm chip, and members of the team are working on making it run on the HTC G1 handset, according to Philip Levis, a Stanford assistant professor. Levis spoke about Cinder at the Stanford Computer Forum on Tuesday. If an application isn't running as fast as the user wants, a Cinder-based phone could include a button to boost the energy allocated to that application, Levis said. Cinder also could allow users to download any code and run it safely on their phones in a 'sandbox' mode."
Re:Umm (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like it, but it's not a bad idea - the processors used in phones are capable of running at a much higher speed. They don't normally because higher speed == more power, even at idle.
nice java (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see why these "cinder" features can't be delivered by realtime UI to nice [netadmintools.com] and with a Java sandbox. In other words, Android or any other Linux phoneOS, with a little tweak wiring top [netadmintools.com] to nice, and a Java VM. App running slow, crank out the "nice" level, and it will suck more juice as it runs faster than the other apps left out of the juice rotation. Put the UI in terms of power instead of CPU, and you're groovy.
Re:Umm (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't this the problem with this idea? Users will just hit the "turbo" button all the time because non-instantaneous is too slow. This both defeats the purpose (since everything will run at turbo) and will annoy the user (when "turbo" isn't fast enough).
Isn't spending 20k cycles at full power and then dropping back to next-to-no-power during idle sometimes more efficient than spending 20k cycles at 20% power (which has to run 5x as long)?
Wouldn't it simply be better to make a little indicator icon of how much power is being used at a instant (happy battery / busy battery / battery on treadmill / battery playing Sisyphus)? Then users could see which apps use too much power (3D games, audio analysis, lots of stupid animation) and which use little (crossword puzzle) so they could adjust their behavior and/or try to get developers to improve the applications that are needlessly wasteful?
Re:Umm (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, but OS's traditionally don't limit the processing power available to a task if the processor would otherwise be available - I think the difference here is that scheduler stops a process consuming more than (say) 1/10 of the CPU even if that means the CPU is idle 8/10 of the time; because the user would rather keep 8/10 reserved to make the battery last longer.
Enegry consumed by an application really means 'enegry consumed by the system as a whole because it is running that particular application.' Clamping the run-time of an application should clamp the enegry consumption of that application.