Title: Multi-architecture profiler for Android

Authors: Anderson Luiz Sartor; Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck

Addresses: Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil; Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, 91509-900, Building 67, Room 213, Porto Alegre, Brazil ' Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil; Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, 91509-900, Building 67, Room 213, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Abstract: Performance and energy consumption are well-known constraints of modern embedded systems, thus, application analysis in early stages of the development cycle is mandatory. However, the few available tools to evaluate the behaviour of an application considering different architectures are not able to provide a complete solution for this task. In this context, this work presents a multi-architecture profiling tool for Android applications, which fully supports ARM, MIPS, and x86 architectures. It provides a wide range of information per application, including energy consumption, execution time and other statistics. For that, we have extended the Android Emulator QEMU and developed post-processing tools. As case study, we have compared different architectures in terms of performance and energy consumption. By the use of the proposed tool, we show that, given a fixed energy budget, a different amount of applications can be executed depending on how they were implemented, which varies according to the processor.

Keywords: Android emulator; Android applications; QEMU; profiling; profiler; Java Native Interface; JNI; performance evaluation; energy consumption estimation; Dalvik.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2017.083648

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2017 Vol.7 No.1, pp.41 - 55

Received: 09 Apr 2016
Accepted: 31 Jan 2017

Published online: 13 Apr 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article