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A Toolkit for Specializing Production Operating System Code
Crispin Cowan, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & TechnologyFollow
Dylan McNamee, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology
Andrew P. Black, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & TechnologyFollow
Calton Pu, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & TechnologyFollow
Jonathan Walpole, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & TechnologyFollow
Charles Krasic, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology
Perry Wagle, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & TechnologyFollow
Qian Zhang, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology
This research is partially supported by DARPA grant N00014-94-1-0845 and DARPA contract F19628-95-C-0193, NSF grant CCR-9224375, and grants from the Hewlett-Packard Company and Tektronix.
Computer architecture, Operating systems (Computers) -- Evaluation, Operating systems (Computers) -- Design and construction
Specialization has been recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing operating systems. However, specialization has not been broadly applied beyond the research community because the current techniques, based on manual specialization, are time-consuming and error-prone. This paper describes a specialization toolkit that should help broaden the applicability of specializing operating systems by assisting in the automatic generation of specialized code, and {\em guarding} the specialized code to ensure the specialized system continues to be correct. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit by describing experiences we have had applying it in real, production environments. We report on our experiences with applying the tools to three disparate portions of operating systems: signal delivery, memory allocation and RPC. We describe how we used the toolkit to specialize these components, and present the resulting performance improvements. We conclude that a toolkit-based approach to specialization can work, and is an effective operating system optimization technique.
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Department of Computer Science & Engineering Technical Report CSE-97-004 97-004.
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/10646
Cowan, Crispin, Dylan McNamee, Andrew Black, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, and Qian Zhang. A toolkit for specializing production operating system code. Technical Report CSE-97-004, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute, 1997.
Computer and Systems Architecture Commons, OS and Networks Commons
Melanie Mitchell
Jonathan Walpole
Andrew P. Black