Macromodeling and characterization of filesystem energy consumption for diskless embedded systems

The use and application of embedded systems in everyday life has proliferated in the past few years. These systems are constrained in terms of power consumption, available memory and processing requirements. Typical embedded systems like handheld devices, cell phones, single board computer based systems are diskless and use flash for secondary storage. The choice of filesystem for these diskless systems can greatly impact the performance and the energy consumption of the system as well as lifetime of flash.

In this thesis work, the energy consumption of flash based filesystems has been characterized. Both the processor and flash energy consumption are characterized as a function of filesystem specific operations. The work is aimed at helping a system designer compare and contrast different filesystems based on energy consumption as a metric. The macromodel can be used to characterize and estimate the energy consumption of applications due to filesystem running on flash.

The study is done on a StrongARM based processor running Linux. Two of the popular filesystems JFFS2 and ext3 are profiled.