Title
An embedded systems programming environment for c
Abstract
Resource constraints are a major concern with the design, development, and deployment of embedded systems. Embedded systems are highly hardware-dependent and have little computational power. Mobile embedded systems are further constrained by their limited battery capacity. Many of these systems are still programmed in assembly language because there is a lack of efficient programming environments. To overcome or at least alleviate the restrictions, we propose a light-weight and versatile programming environment for the C programming language that offers mixed-mode execution, i.e., code is either executed on the CPU or on a virtual machine (VM). This mixed-mode execution environment combines the advantages of highly compressed bytecode with the speed of machine code. We have implemented the programming environment and conducted experiments for selected programs of the MiBench suite and the Spec 2000. The VM has a footprint of 12 KB on the Intel IA32. Initial results show that the performance of the virtual machine is typically only 2 to 36 times slower than the binary execution, with compressed code occupying only 36%–57% of the machine code size. Combining sequences of VM instructions into new VM instructions (superinstructions) increases the execution speed and reduces the VM code size. Preliminary experiments indicate a speedup by a factor of 3.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1007/11823285_127
Euro-Par
Keywords
Field
DocType
machine code,vm code size,binary execution,vm instruction,c programming language,efficient programming environment,new vm instruction,virtual machine,machine code size,embedded systems programming environment,execution speed,embedded system
Virtual machine,Computer science,Distributed computing,Speedup,Central processing unit,Parallel computing,Binary code,Assembly language,Machine code,Spec#,Bytecode,Operating system,Embedded system
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
4128
0302-9743
3-540-37783-2
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.42
15
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bernd Burgstaller113317.54
Bernhard Scholz210410.59
Anton Ertl350.42