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Abstract
With the proliferation in the usage scenarios of mobile handheld devices, understanding typical client usage patterns is fundamental to developing new policies to improve the usability of these devices. In this thesis, we describe a Palm system call logging tool called Palmist. Palmist allows the practitioner to selectively collect statistics such as the system call invoked, application that invoked the system call, the time of the call and the system call arguments. Our logging mechanism consumes about 20 bytes of memory on the PDA to store the log record. The logging mechanism adds a latency of about 10 msec to collect the log. The mechanism has limitations in collecting logs for system calls that are needed by the collection mechanism itself. Our logging mechanism works for about 88% (735 of 834 relevant system calls) of the Palm OS 3.5 system calls. Our system can be utilized by system developers to customize their application behavior to optimize system parameters such as energy consumption and ease of use.