The revenge of the overlay: Automatic compaction of OS kernel code via on-demand code loading

There is increasing interest in using general-purpose operating systems, such as Linux, on embedded platforms. It is especially important in embedded systems to use memory efficiently because embedded processors often have limited physical memory. This paper describes an automatic technique for reducing the memory footprint of general-purpose operating systems on embedded platforms by keeping infrequently executed code on secondary storage and loading such code only if it is needed at run time. Our technique is based on an old idea - memory overlays - and it does not require hardware or operating system support for virtual memory. A prototype of the technique has been implemented for the Linux kernel. We evaluate our approach with two benchmark suites: MiBench and MediaBench, and a Web server application. The experimental results show that our approach reduces memory requirements for the Linux kernel code by about 53% with little degradation in performance.