  Smart devices see a large number of ephemeral tasks driven by background
activities. In order to execute such a task, the OS kernel wakes up the
platform beforehand and puts it back to sleep afterwards. In doing so, the
kernel operates various IO devices and orchestrates their power state
transitions. Such kernel executions are inefficient as they mismatch typical
CPU hardware. They are better off running on a low-power, microcontroller-like
core, i.e., peripheral core, relieving CPU from the inefficiency.
  We therefore present a new OS structure, in which a lightweight virtual
executor called transkernel offloads specific phases from a monolithic kernel.
The transkernel translates stateful kernel execution through cross-ISA, dynamic
binary translation (DBT); it emulates a small set of stateless kernel services
behind a narrow, stable binary interface; it specializes for hot paths; it
exploits ISA similarities for lowering DBT cost.
  Through an ARM-based prototype, we demonstrate transkernel's feasibility and
benefit. We show that while cross-ISA DBT is typically used under the
assumption of efficiency loss, it can enable efficiency gain, even on
off-the-shelf hardware.
