(PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit)-Based Dynamic XIP(eXecute In Place) Technique for Embedded Systems)

내장형 시스템을 위한 PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) 기반 동적 XIP (eXecute In Place) 기법

These days, mobile embedded systems adopt flash memory capable of XIP feature since they can reduce memory usage, power consumption, and software load time. XIP provides direct access to ROM and flash memory for processors. However, using XIP incurs unnecessary degradation of applications' performance because direct access to ROM and flash memory shows more delay than that to main memory. In this paper, we propose a memory management framework, dynamic XIP, which can resolve the performance degradation of using XIP. Using a constrained RAM cache, dynamic XIP can dynamically change XIP region according to page access pattern to reduce performance degradation in execution time or energy consumption resulting from native XIP problem. The proposed framework consists of a page profiler gathering applications' memory access pattern using PMU and an XIP manager deciding that a page is accessed whether in main memory or in flash memory. The proposed framework is implemented and evaluated in Linux kernel. Our evaluation shows that our framework can reduce execution time at most 25% and energy consumption at most 22% compared with using XIP-only case adopted in general mobile embedded systems. Moreover, the evaluation shows that in execution time and energy consumption, our modified LRU algorithm with code page filters can reduce more than at most 90% and 80% respectively compared with applying just existing LRU algorithm to dynamic XIP.