Design and Implementation of Kernel Binder Cache to Accelerate Android IPC

Jesung Yeon, Jinseok Im, Byungjun Jeon, Seungjun Lee, Eunji Lee, Hyokyung Bahn

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Android supports a variety of service functions via user-level daemons. As applications invoke these service functions through IPC (Inter-Process Communication), accelerating IPC performance is critical to the responsiveness in Android. However, Android provides long IPC latency of more than 240us due to complicated software stacks between the kernel Binder and the user-level process Context Manager. Specifically, Android supports IPC via a virtual device driver called Binder, but actual tasks for IPC such as service function search and management are performed by a user-level process called Context Manager. This separation is advantageous in terms of modularity and flexibility, but degrades the responsiveness of services significantly due to additional context switching and inefficient request handling. To resolve this issue, we analyze the end-to-end path of Android IPC mechanisms and observe that 55% of IPC latency is due to the communication overhead between Binder and Context Manager. Based on this observation, we design and implement a kernel Binder cache that maintains a hot subset of service function mappings, thereby reducing requests transferred to Context Manager. The proposed Binder cache is implemented on Android 5.0 Lollipop. Measurement studies on Nexus 5 show that our Binder cache accelerates IPC performance twofold compared to current Android.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2016 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2016
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages22-28
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781509024797
DOIs
StatePublished - 29 Sep 2016
Event22nd IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2016 - Daegu, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 17 Aug 201619 Aug 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2016 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2016

Conference

Conference22nd IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2016
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityDaegu
Period17/08/1619/08/16

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No.2011-0028825) and the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (No. 2014R1A1A3053505).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Android
  • Binder System
  • IPC (Inter-process Communication)
  • Mobile System

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