Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Computer Sciences

Portland State University

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Series

Computer architecture

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

A Toolkit For Specializing Production Operating System Code, Crispin Cowan, Dylan Mcnamee, Andrew P. Black, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang Jun 1997

A Toolkit For Specializing Production Operating System Code, Crispin Cowan, Dylan Mcnamee, Andrew P. Black, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 …


A Study Of Dynamic Optimization Techniques: Lessons And Directions In Kernel Design, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole Jan 1993

A Study Of Dynamic Optimization Techniques: Lessons And Directions In Kernel Design, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Synthesis kernel [21,22,23,27,28] showed that dynamic code generation, software feedback, and fine-grain modular kernel organization are useful implementation techniques for improving the performance of operating system kernels. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, we discovered that there are strong interactions between the techniques. Hence, a careful and systematic combination of the techniques can be very powerful even though each one by itself may have serious limitations. By identifying these interactions we illustrate the problems of applying each technique in isolation to existing kernels. We also highlight the important common under-pinnings of the Synthesis experience and present our ideas on …