Towards Just-In-Time Compiling of Operating Systems
Maximilian Ott, Phillip Raffeck, Volkmar Sieh, Wolfgang Schröder‐Preikschat · 2023
Operating systems are crucial for the performance of the overall system. Any inefficiency leads to a suboptimal use of the available resources and causes performance loss. The wide range of processors in use today makes it challenging to generate the most efficient code for the current hardware ahead of time. Just-in-time compilation, on the other hand, is able to generate efficient code tailored to the current execution context going beyond the processor, also including operating-system configuration or application demands. Moreover, its configuration can even be adapted at runtime to match the current external and internal requirements. Unfortunately, on-demand compilation of operating-system code has not found widespread use due to inherent difficulties stemming from the fact that any just-in-time approach requires extensive runtime support (e.g., for memory allocation for the generated code) usually provided by the operating system itself. A chicken-and-egg problem is found.