Framework-assisted Selective Page Protection for Improving Interactivity of Linux Based Mobile Devices

While Linux-based mobile devices such as smartphones are increasingly used, they often exhibit poor response time. One of the factors that influence the user-perceived interactivity is the high page fault rate of interactive tasks. Pages owned by interactive tasks can be removed from the main memory due to the memory contention between interactive and background tasks. Since this increases the page fault rate of the interactive tasks, their executions tend to suffer from increased delays. This paper proposes a framework-assisted selective page protection mechanism for improving interactivity of Linux-based mobile devices. The framework-assisted selective page protection enables the run-time system to identify interactive tasks at the framework level and to deliver their IDs to the kernel. As a result, the kernel can maintain the pages owned by the identified interactive tasks and avoid the occurrences of page faults. The experimental results demonstrate the selective page protection technique reduces response time up to 11% by reducing the page fault rate by 37%.