GSOC 2013 project " Kernel Size Reduction for Embedded System "

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 20:28:04 +0000
Amit Rawat <aamitr4 at gmail.com> wrote:

> GSOC posted the list of selected organization for GSOC 2013 and I am
> highly happy that FreeBSD is among the selected organization.
> 
> I am a third year student interested to work in the field of embedded
> system. I applied last year and the title of my project was " Kernel
> Size Reduction for Embedded System". The link to my last year
> proposal is "
> https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/amitrawat10/1#c8001"
> But due to some flaws it doesn't get selected. I am looking to
> improve my proposal for this year and apply again. I explain some
> portion of my project pictorially on my blog
> 
> "
> https://amit10rawat.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/kernel-size-reduction-for-embedded-system/
> "
> 
> I am looking for suggestion and new ideas by which I can reduce the
> size of kernel.
> 
did you look at historic operating systems and how they did it?

When I was a student, we simply loaded a module into memory and then
wrote it to an external memory when not needed. It was a very basic
swapping algorithm with fixed size. It did not differentiate between
code and data etc. All calls where done through a wrapper which was
always in memory. So, the module was loaded by the OS. The OS did not
notice that we removed the code from memory. Only the wrapper knew of
what we did.

We selected functions/modules which have to be in memory and which
could be on disk. There was a fixed number of memory segments we could
use for loading external modules. The trick was to select the modules
so that the system did not lock up.

We did not use  a tree structure what you might could.

The advantage of this was that the actual code was not
modified.

Yes, I know that this is hard core.

My problem would be that I do not know how much effort it would be to
implement this in a modern operating system.

Erich


> Amit Rawat(amraw)
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