Energy Harvesting Systems Need an Operating System Too

Abstract

Software support for intermittent devices has emerged as a key area of research in resource-constrained computing. Work in this area aims to ease application development by providing support for making forward progress in the face of frequent power outages. Typically, systems in prior work provide a runtime or a kernel as the system abstraction and are customized for a small set of hardware. In this paper, we propose our vision for the future of intermittent computing and explore extending a general-purpose embedded operating system to handle intermittent workloads. We show how many common OS abstractions benefit the highly constrained intermittent domain and describe the design extensions required to support intermittent devices. We evaluate the system with respect to memory, time, and developer overhead and argue that full OS support is a promising direction for future intermittent systems.