# Nature of System Calls in CPU-centric Computing Paradigm

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how system call performance in CPU-centric systems depends on hardware components, revealing a strong link to CPU architecture and a lesser influence of storage type, informing future NVM system design.

## Contribution

It analyzes the dependencies between system call performance and hardware components, highlighting the dominant role of CPU architecture in system call efficiency.

## Key findings

- Strong dependency between system call performance and CPU architecture.
- Persistent storage type has a lesser impact on system call performance.
- Histograms reveal distribution patterns of system call durations across platforms.

## Abstract

Modern operating systems are typically POSIX-compliant with major system calls specified decades ago. The next generation of non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies raise concerns about the efficiency of the traditional POSIX-based systems. As one step toward building high performance NVM systems, we explore the potential dependencies between system call performance and major hardware components (e.g., CPU, memory, storage) under typical user cases (e.g., software compilation, installation, web browser, office suite) in this paper. We build histograms for the most frequent and time-consuming system calls with the goal to understand the nature of distribution on different platforms. We find that there is a strong dependency between the system call performance and the CPU architecture. On the other hand, the type of persistent storage plays a less important role in affecting the performance.