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Automated reduction of the memory footprint of the Linux kernel

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Koen De BosschereAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), Volume 6, Issue 4

Pages 23 - es

https://doi.org/10.1145/1274858.1274861

Published: 01 September 2007 Publication History

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Abstract

The limited built-in configurability of Linux can lead to expensive code size overhead when it is used in the embedded market. To overcome this problem, we propose the application of link-time compaction and specialization techniques that exploit the a priori known, fixed runtime environment of many embedded systems. In experimental setups based on the ARM XScale and i386 platforms, the proposed techniques are able to reduce the kernel memory footprint with over 16%. We also show how relatively simple additions to existing binary rewriters can implement the proposed techniques for a complex, very unconventional program, such as the Linux kernel. We note that even after specialization, a lot of seemingly unnecessary code remains in the kernel and propose to reduce the footprint of this code by applying code-compression techniques. This technique, combined with the previous ones, reduces the memory footprint with over 23% for the i386 platform and 28% for the ARM platform. Finally, we pinpoint an important code size growth problem when compaction and compression techniques are combined on the ARM platform.

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Automated reduction of the memory footprint of the Linux kernel

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Reviews

Reviewer: Olivier Louis Marie Lecarme

Nowadays, when one gigabyte (GB) of memory storage is considered much too small, one would be surprised to know that it is important to reduce the size of a program when it reaches about one megabyte (MB). To an old computer scientist, this may recall the times when a full operating system resident part would need no more than 100 kilobytes (KB). When using a monolithic kernel like Linux on an embedded platform with 64 MB of storage, it is important to reduce the memory footprint of the kernel as much as possible, even if this slightly reduces performance. Instead of trying to customize the kernel source code, or to parametrize it at compile time, Chanet et al. want to be able to automate the compaction techniques in order to operate at link time. Because of the very special nature of a kernel, they have to employ various techniques: eliminating unused system call handlers; specializing system calls in order to use available optimization techniques; specializing boot time parameters; moving initializing code to the part freed after initialization time; and compressing unexecuted code that could be called in abnormal situations only. They have to take into account several kernel code peculiarities, such as memory-mapped input/output (MMIO) or very low-level special instruction sequences, as well as multithreading. All these techniques are assessed separately, and their effect is clearly evaluated. The detailed results are significantly different on a CISC processor (x86) and a RISC one (ARM), but the overall footprint reduction is 23.3 percent on the first one, and 28.0 percent on the second one. I wonder whether using Hurd’s idea of a nonmonolithic kernel would avoid all this work. However, this 25-page paper makes a very interesting read, from cover to cover. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 6, Issue 4

Special Section LCTES'05

September 2007

352 pages

ISSN:1539-9087

EISSN:1558-3465

DOI:10.1145/1274858

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Association for Computing Machinery

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ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

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Published: 01 September 2007

Published in TECS Volume 6, Issue 4

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de Hoz Diego JSaldana JFernandez-Navajas JRuiz-Mas J(2020)Decoupling Security From Applications in CoAP-Based IoT DevicesIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2019.29513067:1(467-476)Online publication date: Jan-2020
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Yuan PGuo YZhang LChen XMei H(2018)Building application-specific operating systems: a profile-guided approachScience China Information Sciences10.1007/s11432-017-9418-961:9Online publication date: 13-Aug-2018
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System-wide compaction and specialization of the linux kernel

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System-wide compaction and specialization of the linux kernel

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