Self-Monitoring in VINO

Abstract

Computer system performance is a measure of how well the operating system shares hardware and software resources among the various applications that are running on it. The goal of performance monitoring in the VINO extensible operating system is to make recommendations for improving application performance. This is accomplished by collecting system data through a monitoring agent, automatically identifying conditions causing performance degradation, and presenting evidence to support its conclusions. Once the operating system is well monitored, it may be able to tune itself to improve system performance. Within the framework of VINO, I describe a system that monitors itself and gathers information about its performance. I show that system monitoring is advantageous for two reasons. First, by utilizing sample user applications, it is capable of warning designers of application bottlenecks and system degradation. Second, the operating system can dynamically self-adapt its own kernel behavior and policies after monitoring access patterns. Thus, the monitoring system aids the application designer in defining performance limitations and adapts kernel policies to improve overall system performance.