Linux Kernel Compaction through Cold Code Swapping

Abstract

Abstract. There is a growing trend to use general-purpose operating systems like Linux in embedded systems. Previous research focused on using compaction and specialization techniques to adapt a general-purpose OS to the memory-constrained environment presented by most embedded systems. However, there is still room for improvement: it has been shown that even after application of the aforementioned techniques more than 50% of the kernel code remains unexecuted under normal system operation. We introduce a new technique that reduces the Linux kernel code memory footprint through on-demand code loading of infrequently executed code, for systems that support virtual memory. In this paper, we describe our general approach, and we study code placement algorithms to minimize the performance impact of the code loading. A code size reduction of 68% is achieved, with a 2.2% execution speedup of the system-mode execution time, for a case study based on the MediaBench II benchmark suite.

Building application-specific operating systems: a profile-guided approach

“…Profile feedback can also play an important role in specific optimizations for the kernel such as I-cache packaging [27] and on-demand code loading of infrequently executed code [28].…”

Countering unauthorized code execution on commodity kernels: A survey of common interfaces allowing kernel code modification

“…Applications such as the Bluepill installer [61] can modify the kernel though forcing kernel pages to be swapped out, modifying those pages on disk, and then causing the pages to be pulled back into physical memory and the code on them run. While Linux, in contrast to Windows Vista, does not appear to swap kernel code out to disk, it still allows kernel data to be swapped, and proposals exist for swapping kernel code [18].…”