Design and Development of Lightweight Operating System Framework for Smart Devices

2. Literature Survey

An OS should be customized for the specific application to overcome the problem of memory footprint, redundant code, boot time and complexity of an OS. This section discusses the study of the literature on various existing frameworks. Moreover, the survey gives the conceptual basis and information about what has been done in the field of an OS customization.

(Gauthier et al., 2001) targeted heterogeneous application areas for automatic application SW and proposed automatic generation of application specific OS relying on OS code library with macro language codes. ARM7 processor is targeted with tree-based approach for specific APIs in task scheduler. Architecture analyzer, code selector and code expander were used to generate a processor specific make file to be used in the OS kernel. The proposed method is tested on a VDSL framer and a token ring system.

(Chang & Chang, 2003) proposed a minimal overhead extensible kernel in their framework: OS Portal that follows the client - server model. Client kernel is extensible by downloading of those application specific requirements that are not present in the current version. Server model took care for symbol generation using nm, GNU binary utility. Via symbol table of client version, OS Portal links required module to modify Linux kernel.