Compact binaries with code compression in a software dynamic translator

Embedded software is becoming more flexible and adaptable, which presents new challenges for management of highly constrained system resources. Software dynamic translation (SDT) has been used to enable software malleability at the instruction level for dynamic code optimizers, security checkers, and binary translators. This paper studies the feasibility of using SDT to manage program code storage in embedded systems. We explore to what extent code compression can be incorporated in a software infrastructure to reduce program storage requirements, while minimally impacting run-time performance and memory resources. We describe two approaches for code compression, called full and partial image compression, and evaluate their compression ratios and performance in a software dynamic translation system. We demonstrate that code decompression is indeed feasible in a SDT.