Trident: Identifying, Constraining and Multi-Domain Governing for Resource Management on Mobile Devices

Mobile applications such as browsers, video, and other interactive software are tightly coupled with frame rendering, which is critical for user experience. Frame rendering requires the collaboration of CPU, GPU, and memory to ensure energy efficiency and maintain Quality of Experience (QoE). However, there are notable deficiencies in resource management for these components. Our observations reveal three critical issues: 1) the operating system fails to accurately identify rendering-related threads, 2) thread groups lack strict resource constraints, leading to insufficient resources for rendering-related threads, and 3) frequency scaling across components is not coordinated, resulting in performance degradation and power inefficiencies. To address these issues, we propose Trident, a holistic resource management framework. Trident includes a cross-layer thread tracer to identify rendering-related threads, a reinforcement learning-based governor to coordinate the frequency of multiple hardware components, and a gain scheduling-based share controller to constrain resources among thread groups dynamically. Our framework aims to minimize power consumption while maintaining QoE. We implement Trident as a system service on five distinct smartphones, from older models to recent flagships, and evaluate its effectiveness on popular applications under various workloads. The results demonstrate that Trident reduces power consumption by up to 16.8% compared to three state-of-the-art techniques while ensuring QoE on mobile platforms. Additionally, the overhead introduced by Trident is minimal, making it an efficient solution for real-world deployment.