Remote customization of systems code for embedded devices

ABSTRACT

Dedicated operating systems for embedded systems are fast being phased out due to their use of manual optimization, which provides high performance and small footprint, but also requires high maintenance and portability costs every time hardware evolves.In this paper, we describe an approach based on customization of generic operating system modules. Our approach uses a remote customization server to automatically generate highly optimized code that is then loaded and executed in the kernel of the embedded device. This process combines the advantages of generic systems software code (leveraging portability and evolution costs) with the advantages of customization (small footprint and low overhead).We have validated our customization infrastructure with a case study: the TCP/IP stack of the Linux kernel. We analyzed the performance and size of the customized code generated on three platforms: a Pentium III (600MHz), an ARM SA1100 (200Mhz) on a COMPAQ iPAQ, and a 486 (40MHz). The customized code runs about 25% faster and its size reduces by up to a factor of 20. The throughput of the protocol stack improves by up to 21%.

REFERENCES

• 1: B.N. Bershad, C. Chambers, S. Eggers, C. Maeda, D. McNamee, P. Pardyak, S. Savage, and E. G"un~Sirer. SPIN -- an extensible microkernel for application-specific operating system services. Technical Report 94-03-03, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, February 1994.
• 2: S. Bhatia, C. Consel, A.-F. Le Meur, and C. Pu. Tool-based specialization of protocol stacks in OS kernels. Research report, LaBRI, February 2004.
• 3: Hewlett-Packard company Information Networks Division. Netperf: A network performance benchmark, February 1996.
• 4: Charles Consel , Julia L. Lawall , Anne-Françoise Le Meur, A tour of tempo: a program specializer for the C language, Science of Computer Programming, v.52 n.1-3, p.341-370, August 2004 [doi>10.1016/j.scico.2004.03.011]
• 5: Evans Data Corporation. Embedded systems development survey. http://www.evansdata.com, 2003.
• 6: Dominic Duggan, Type-based hot swapping of running modules (extended abstract), Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, September 03-05, 2001, Florence, Italy
• 7: D. R. Engler , M. F. Kaashoek , J. O'Toole, Jr., Exokernel: an operating system architecture for application-level resource management, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.251-266, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• 8: Bryan Ford , Godmar Back , Greg Benson , Jay Lepreau , Albert Lin , Olin Shivers, The Flux OSKit: a substrate for kernel and language research, Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.38-51, October 05-08, 1997, Saint Malo, France
• 9: G. Denys , F. Piessens , F. Matthijs, A survey of customizability in operating systems research, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.34 n.4, p.450-468, December 2002 [doi>10.1145/592642.592644]
• 10: Neil D. Jones , Carsten K. Gomard , Peter Sestoft, Partial evaluation and automatic program generation, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1993
• 11: J. L. Lawall, G. Muller, and L. P. Barreto. Capturing OS expertise in a modular type system: the Bossa experience. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS European Workshop 2002 (EW2002), pages 54--62, Saint-Emilion, France, September 2002.
• 12: Anne-Françoise Le Meur , Julia L. Lawall , Charles Consel, Specialization Scenarios: A Pragmatic Approach to Declaring Program Specialization, Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, v.17 n.1-2, p.47-92, March-June 2004
• 13: Dylan McNamee , Jonathan Walpole , Calton Pu , Crispin Cowan , Charles Krasic , Ashvin Goel , Perry Wagle , Charles Consel , Gilles Muller , Renauld Marlet, Specialization tools and techniques for systematic optimization of system software, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.19 n.2, p.217-251, May 2001 [doi>10.1145/377769.377778]
• 14: C. Pu , T. Autrey , A. Black , C. Consel , C. Cowan , J. Inouye , L. Kethana , J. Walpole , K. Zhang, Optimistic incremental specialization: streamlining a commercial operating system, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.314-321, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• 15: Margo I. Seltzer , Yasuhiro Endo , Christopher Small , Keith A. Smith, Dealing with disaster: surviving misbehaved kernel extensions, Proceedings of the second USENIX symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, p.213-227, October 29-November 01, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States
• 16: Alistair C. Veitch , Norman C. Hutchinson, Kea - A Dynamically Extensible and Configurable Operating System Kernel, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems, p.236, May 06-08, 1996

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
remote customization, remote specialization, specialization server