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.

Existing algorithms for computing dominators are formulated for control flow graphs of single procedures. With the rise of computing power, and the viability of whole-program analyses and optimizations, there is a growing need to extend the dominator computation algorithms to context-sensitive interprocedural dominators. Because the transitive reduction of the interprocedural dominator graph is not a tree, as in the intraprocedural case, it is not possible to extend existing algorithms directly. In this article, we propose a new algorithm for computing interprocedural dominators. Although the theoretical complexity of this new algorithm is as high as that of a straightforward iterative solution of the data flow equations, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the algorithm is practically viable, even for programs consisting of several hundred thousands of basic blocks.

In the past decade, real-time embedded systems have become much more complex due to the introduction of a lot of new functionality in one application, and due to running multiple applications concurrently. This increases the dynamic nature of today’s applications and systems, and tightens the requirements for their constraints in terms of deadlines and energy consumption. State-of-theart design methodologies try to cope with these novel issues by identifying several most used cases and dealing with them separately, reducing the newly introduced complexity. This paper presents a generic and systematic design-time/run-time methodology for handling the dynamic nature of modern embedded systems, which can be utilized by existing design methodologies to increase their efficiency. It is based on the concept of system scenarios, which group system behaviors that are similar from a multi-dimensional cost perspective, such as resource requirements, delay, and energy consumption, in such a way that the system can be configured to exploit this cost similarity. At design-time, these scenarios are individually optimized. Mechanisms for predicting the current scenario at run-time and for switching between scenarios are also derived. This design trajectory is augmented with a run-time calibration mechanism, which allows the system to learn on-the-fly during its execution, and to adapt itself to the current input stimuli, by extending the

In the past decade, real-time embedded systems have become much more complex due to the introduction of a lot of new functionality in one application, and due to running multiple applications concurrently. This increases the dynamic nature of today’s applications and systems, and tightens the requirements for their constraints in terms of deadlines and energy consumption. State-of-theart design methodologies try to cope with these novel issues by identifying several most used cases and dealing with them separately, reducing the newly introduced complexity. This paper presents a generic and systematic design-time/run-time methodology for handling the dynamic nature of modern embedded systems, which can be utilized by existing design methodologies to increase their efficiency. It is based on the concept of system scenarios, which group system behaviors that are similar from a multi-dimensional cost perspective, such as resource requirements, delay, and energy consumption, in such a way that the system can be configured to exploit this cost similarity. At design-time, these scenarios are individually optimized. Mechanisms for predicting