Sangwook Shane Hahn  Inhyuk Yee  Donguk Ryu  Jihong Kim

I/O trace tool Android platform I/O tracer kernel I/O tracer I/O visualizer

Application response time is critical to end-user response time in Android smartphones. Due to the plentiful resources of recent smartphones, storage I/O response time becomes a major key factor in application response time. However, existing storage I/O trace tools for Android and Linux give limited information only for a specific I/O layer which makes it difficult to combine I/O information from different I/O layers, because not helpful for application developer and researchers. In this paper, we propose a novel storage I/O trace tool for Android, called AIOPro (Android I/O profiler). It traces storage I/O from application - Android platform - system call - virtual file system - native file system - page cache - block layer - SCSI layer and device driver. It then combines the storage I/O information from I/O layers by linking them with file information and physical address. Our evaluations of real smartphone usage scenarios and benchmarks show that AIOPro can track storage I/O information from all I/O layers without any data loss under 0.1% system overheads.