Paper Info
Title
A method-based ahead-of-time compiler for android applications
Abstract
The execution environment of Android system is based on a virtual machine called Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) in which the execution of an application program is in interpret-mode. To reduce the interpretation overhead of DVM, Google has included a trace-based just-in-time compiler (JITC) in the latest version of Android. Due to limited resources and the requirement for reasonable response time, the JITC is unable to apply deep optimizations to generate high quality code. In this paper, we propose a method-based ahead-of-time compiler (AOTC), called Icing, to speed up the execution of Android applications without the modification of any components of Android framework. The main idea of Icing is to convert the hot methods of an application program from DEX code to C code and uses the GCC compiler to translate the C code to the corresponding native code. With the Java Native Interface (JNI) library, the translated native code can be called by DVM. Both AOTC and JITC have their strength and weakness. In order to combine the strength and avoid the weakness of AOTC and JITC, in Icing, we have proposed a cost model to determine whether a method should be handled by AOTC or JITC during profiling. To evaluate the performance of Icing, four benchmarks used by Google JITC are used as test cases. The performance results show that, with Icing, the execution time of an application is two to three times faster than that without JITC, and 25% to 110% faster than that with JITC.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2038698.2038704
CASES
Keywords
Field
DocType
high quality code,corresponding native code,android application,dex code,android system,c code,android framework,native code,google jitc,application program,method-based ahead-of-time compiler,virtual machines,mobile computing,android,reverse engineering,virtual machine,java,just in time compiler
Virtual machine,Computer science,Real-time computing,Just-in-time compilation,Java Native Interface,Android (operating system),Parallel computing,Compiler,Machine code,Test case,Java,Operating system,Embedded system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.60
9
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chih-Sheng Wang180.60
Guillermo Perez280.60
Yeh-Ching Chung398397.16
Wei-Chung Hsu471958.87
Wei-Kuan Shih593898.21
Hong-Rong Hsu680.60