4 research outputs found
Nature of System Calls in CPU-centric Computing Paradigm
Modern operating systems are typically POSIX-compliant with major system
calls specified decades ago. The next generation of non-volatile memory (NVM)
technologies raise concerns about the efficiency of the traditional POSIX-based
systems. As one step toward building high performance NVM systems, we explore
the potential dependencies between system call performance and major hardware
components (e.g., CPU, memory, storage) under typical user cases (e.g.,
software compilation, installation, web browser, office suite) in this paper.
We build histograms for the most frequent and time-consuming system calls with
the goal to understand the nature of distribution on different platforms. We
find that there is a strong dependency between the system call performance and
the CPU architecture. On the other hand, the type of persistent storage plays a
less important role in affecting the performance