Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4917

An Experimental Environment Validating the
Suitability of CLI as an Effective Deployment
Format for Embedded Systems ⋆
Marco Cornero, Roberto Costa, Ricardo Fernández Pascual ⋆⋆ ,
Andrea C. Ornstein, and Erven Rohou
STMicroelectronics
Advanced System Technology
Via Cantonale 16E
6928 Manno (Switzerland)
Abstract. Software productivity for embedded systems is greatly limited
by the fragmentation of platforms and associated development tools.
Platform virtualization environments, like Java and Microsoft .NET, help
alleviate the problem, but they are limited to host functionalities running
on the system microcontroller. Due to the ever increasing demand
for processing power, it is desirable to extend their benefits to the rest of
the system. We present an experimental framework based on GCC that
validates the choice of CLI as a suitable processor-independent deployment
format. In particular, we illustrate our GCC port to CLI and we
evaluate the generated bytecode in terms of code size and performance.
We inject it back into GCC through a CLI front-end that we also illustrate,
and we complete the compilation down to native code. We show
that using CLI does not degrade performance. Compared to other CLI
solutions, we offer a full development flow for the C language, generating
a subset of pure CLI that does not require any virtual machine support
other than a JIT compiler. It is therefore well suited for deeply embedded
media processors running high performance media applications.
Keywords: Common Language Infrastructure, embedded systems, deployment,
GCC.
1 Introduction
The productivity of embedded software development is heavily limited by several
factors, the most important being the high fragmentation of the hardware
platforms combined with the multiple target operating systems and associated
tools. Indeed, in order to reach a wide customer base, software developers need
to port, test and maintain their applications to tens of different configurations,
wasting a great deal of effort in the process. Platform virtualization technologies
have been very successful in alleviating this problem, as it is evident by the
⋆ This work was partially funded by the HiPEAC Network of Excellence.
⋆⋆ This author performed this work as a HiPEAC PhD student at STMicroelectronics.
P. Stenström et al. (Eds.): HiPEAC 2008, LNCS 4917, pp. 130–144, 2008.
c○ Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008