Technological advancements in computer hardware and software have made embedded
systems highly affordable and widely used. Consumers have ever increasing demands
for powerful embedded devices such as cell phones, PDAs and media players. Such
complex and feature-rich embedded devices are strictly limited by their battery life-
time. Embedded systems typically are diskless and use flash for secondary storage
due to their low power, persistent storage and small form factor needs. The energy
efficiency of a processor and flash in an embedded system heavily depends on the
choice of file system in use. To address this problem, it is necessary to provide sys-
tem developers with energy profiles of file system activities and energy efficient file
systems. In the first part of the thesis, a macro-model for the CRAMFS file system
is established which characterizes the processor and flash energy consumption due to
file system calls. This macro-model allows a system developer to estimate the energy
consumed by CRAMFS without using an actual power setup. The second part of
the thesis examines the effects of using non-volatile memory as a write-behind buffer
to improve the energy efficiency of JFFS2. Experimental results show that a 4KB
write-behind buffer significantly reduces energy consumption by up to 2-3 times for
consecutive small writes. In addition, the write-behind buffer conserves flash space
since transient data may never be written to flash.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/3766 |
| Date | 16 August 2006 |
| Creators | Goyal, Nitesh |
| Contributors | Mahapatra, Rabi |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 300640 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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