Washington:
A new method will detect software glitches in smartphones called
"no-sleep energy bugs," which can drain batteries while the phones
are not in use.
"These energy bugs are a silent battery killer," said Y. Charlie Hu, Purdue University professor of electrical and computer
engineering. "A fully charged phone battery can be drained in as
little as five hours."
Since conserving battery power is critical for smartphones, the
industry has adopted "an aggressive sleep policy", said Hu, who
co-authored the paper with doctoral students Abhinav Pathak and
Abhilash Jindal and Samuel Midkiff, according to a Purdue
statement.
"What this means is that smartphones are always in a sleep mode,
by default. When there are no active user interactions such as
screen touches, every component, including the central processor,
stays off unless an application instructs the operating system to
keep it on."
Researchers studied 187 Android applications that were found to
contain Android's explicit power control APIs, called "wakelocks".
Of the 187 apps, 42 were found to contain errors - or bugs - in
their wakelock code.
The findings showed the new tool accurately detected all 12
previously known instances of no-sleep energy bugs and found 30
new bugs in the apps.
The glitch has been found in interactive apps, such as phone
applications and services for telephony on Android that must work
even though the user isn't touching the phone. The app may fail to
engage the sleep mode after the interactive session is completed.
Various background operations need to be performed while the phone
is idle. "For example, a mailer may need to automatically update
email by checking with the remote server," Hu said.
To prevent the phone from going to sleep during such operations,
smartphone manufacturers make application programming interfaces,
or APIs, available to app developers.
The developers insert the APIs into apps to instruct the phone to
stay awake long enough to perform necessary operations.
"App developers have to explicitly juggle different power control
APIs that are exported from the operating systems of the
smartphones," Hu said. "Unfortunately, programmers are only
human."
"They make mistakes when using these APIs, which leads to software
bugs that mishandle power control, preventing the phone from
engaging the sleep mode. As a result, the phone stays awake and
drains the battery," adds Hu.
Smartphone users, meanwhile, don't know that their phones have the
bugs. "You don't see any difference," Hu said. "You put it in your
pocket and you think everything is fine. You take it out, and your
battery is dead."
These findings will be presented during the 10th International
Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, or
MobiSys 2012, June 25-29 in the UK.
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