Access Pattern Based Stream Buffer Management Scheme for Portable Media Players [abstract] (IEEE Xplore)
Heejin Ahn, Seongjin Cho, Hyunik Na, and Hwansoo Han
IEEE Transactions on Computer Electronics (TCE), August 2009.
Limited amount of main memories are often available on mobile phones and
portable media players. In multitasking environments, however, programs often
need to wait for pages to be loaded to the main memory, even for the pages once
loaded but swapped out due to memory shortage. Such page fault mechanism
provided by the operating system often becomes the main hindrance to the
uninterrupted playback of multimedia players on portable electronic devices. In
this paper, we propose a memory management scheme that helps multimedia players
perform with a consistent quality, when other processes are concurrently
running on memory limited environments. We devise a profile-based memory
allocation scheme for multimedia stream buffers with the adoption of page
prefetching and pinning. Using periodic monitoring points of main loops, we
profile access patterns of memory, analyze the meaningful access patterns for
stream buffers and provide the access pattern information for custom memory
management. Our scheme helped reduce the number of page faults in heap.
Reductions in page faults for a multimedia player are 60~80% under various
memory-limited execution environments.