[2607.18097] SuperPass: Fast-Tracking Blocking Threads to Mitigate Priority Inversion on Mobile Devices

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arXiv:2607.18097 (cs)

[Submitted on 20 Jul 2026 (v1), last revised 21 Jul 2026 (this version, v2)]

Title:SuperPass: Fast-Tracking Blocking Threads to Mitigate Priority Inversion on Mobile Devices

Authors:Lei Li, Yu Liang, Riwei Pan, Youcheng Sun, Nan Guan, Tei-Wei Kuo, Chun Jason Xue<br>View a PDF of the paper titled SuperPass: Fast-Tracking Blocking Threads to Mitigate Priority Inversion on Mobile Devices, by Lei Li and 6 other authors

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Abstract:Priority inversion occurs when a high-priority thread is delayed by a lower-priority one. Although well studied in real-time systems, its impact in general-purpose OSes (e.g., Android) remains underexplored. On Android, we find that priority inversions happen frequently and can delay latency-critical threads, degrading user experience. For example, the foreground app's UI thread is frequently blocked by low-priority threads, with blocking durations of up to 210 ms, enough to cause dropped frames. Existing solutions designed for real-time systems fail to eliminate long priority-inversion blockings on latency-critical threads and may introduce high overhead on Android. To solve this problem, we uncover two insights on Android: 1) long blockings are mainly due to the accumulated CPU waiting time of low-priority blocking threads rather than their critical-section latency; and 2) although latency-critical threads can be blocked by many concurrent readers, tracking a limited number of them is sufficient to achieve good responsiveness with low overhead in most cases. Guided by these insights, we propose SuperPass, a lightweight kernel mechanism that mitigates priority inversion by fast-track scheduling of low-priority threads blocking latency-critical threads. It introduces a scheduler fast track that grants immediate CPU access to threads blocking latency-critical threads, and employs a lock-level detector that effectively identifies most such blocking threads. We evaluate SuperPass on a Google Pixel 8 smartphone. Taking UI thread as a case study, SuperPass decreases the 99.9th-percentile blocking duration by 72.0% and blocking count by 47.7% on average compared to the default scheduler, and reduces janky frames by 29.2% with a system-wide CPU overhead of only 0.74%. SuperPass also outperforms existing approaches including priority inheritance, real-time UI promotion, and Proxy Execution.

Subjects:

Operating Systems (cs.OS)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.18097 [cs.OS]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.18097v2 [cs.OS] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18097

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Lei Li [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:59:26 UTC (2,009 KB)

[v2]<br>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:27:37 UTC (2,009 KB)

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