Transforming a bare PC application to run on an ARM device

Author

Peter, Adrian ; Karne, Ramesh K. ; Wijesinha, Alexander L. ; Appiah-Kubi, Patrick

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Towson Univ., Towson, MD, USA

fYear

2013

fDate

4-7 April 2013

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

Bare machine applications currently run on x86-based CPUs without any operating system or kernel support. Their low overhead makes them especially suited for mobile devices and pervasive computing. As an initial step towards running bare applications on mobile devices, we transform an x86-based bare PC graphics application to run on an ARM device. We first identify key differences between the x86 and ARM architectures relevant to the transformation. We then describe a methodology to transform the x86-based bare graphics application to run on the ARM architecture. We also present timing measurements when drawing graphics functions using the same bare application on an x86 bare PC, ARM development board, DOSBox emulator, and QEMU-VM simulator. This work provides insight into designing future bare machine applications that can run on a variety of mobile and pervasive devices with minimal code changes.

Keywords

computer graphics; microprocessor chips; reduced instruction set computing; ARM architectures; ARM development board; ARM device; DOSBox emulator; QEMU-VM simulator; bare PC application; bare machine applications; graphics functions; mobile devices; pervasive computing; timing measurements; x86-based CPU; x86-based bare PC graphics application; Assembly; Clocks; Computer architecture; Graphics; Hardware; Kernel; Timing; ARM architecture; Bare Machine Computing (BMC); mobile devices; pervasive computing; transforming applications;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Southeastcon, 2013 Proceedings of IEEE

Conference_Location

Jacksonville, FL

ISSN

1091-0050

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-0052-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SECON.2013.6567381

Filename

6567381