CSR---EHS: A Framework for Optimizing Embedded Systems

嵌入式系统历史上一直在原始硬件上执行，因此功能有限。硬件的发展催生了更强大的平台，工业和消费者需求也催生了更强大的应用程序。这反过来又导致了包含完整操作系统内核的系统的交付和使用，例如Linux或其嵌入式系统变体之一。这些趋势似乎肯定会继续下去，但相对于功能更强大的机器，硬件资源始终是有限的，因为嵌入式系统通常必须小而便宜，而且通常是电池供电的。该项目旨在通过自动化优化过程来帮助未来嵌入式系统的开发，从而使系统开发人员能够专注于功能，并花费更少的时间担心资源限制，如有限的内存或电力。特别是，该项目正在创建一个可重复使用的优化框架，该框架采用整个嵌入式系统(应用程序、库程序和操作系统内核)，并使用配置文件引导优化来生成使用更少内存、执行更快和使用更少能源的系统的新版本。为了实现这些目标，该项目正在开发技术，给出一个具有固定应用程序集的嵌入式系统：(1)确保我们对应用程序/内核交互有完整的了解(使用分析和静态分析的组合)，(2)优化系统以减少代码大小、执行时间和能源使用(使用二进制重写)，以及(3)确保所产生的系统可以被理解、测试和维护。

Embedded systems have historically executed on primitive hardware and consequently have had limited functionality. Hardware developments have led to much more powerful platforms, and industrial and consumer demands have led to more powerful applications. This in turn has resulted in the delivery and use of systems that contain a full operating system kernel, such as Linux or one of its embedded systems variants. These trends seem certain to continue, but hardware resources will always remain limited relative to more powerful machines because embedded systems must usually be small and inexpensive and often are battery operated.This project aims to assist the development of future embedded systems by automating the optimization process, thus allowing system developers to focus on functionality and spend much less time worrying about resource constraints such as limited memory or power. In particular, the project is creating a reusable optimization framework that takes an entire embedded system (applications, library programs, and operating system kernel) and uses profile-guided optimization to produce a new version of the system that uses much less memory, executes faster, and uses less energy. To realize these goals, the project is developing techniques that, given an embedded system with a fixed set of applications: (1) ensure that we have complete knowledge of application/kernel interactions (using a combination of profiling and static analysis), (2) optimize the system to reduce code size, execution time, and energy usage (using binary rewriting), and (3) ensure that the resulting system can be understood, tested, and maintained.