Publication
Title
A method-based ahead-of-time compiler for android applications
Author
Abstract
The execution environment of Android system is based on a virtual machine called Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) in which the execution of an application program is in interpret-mode. To reduce the interpretation overhead of DVM, Google has included a trace-based just-in-time compiler (JITC) in the latest version of Android. Due to limited resources and the requirement for reasonable response time, the JITC is unable to apply deep optimizations to generate high quality code. In this paper, we propose a method-based ahead-of-time compiler (AOTC), called Icing, to speed up the execution of Android applications without the modification of any components of Android framework. The main idea of Icing is to convert the hot methods of an application program from DEX code to C code and uses the GCC compiler to translate the C code to the corresponding native code. With the Java Native Interface (JNI) library, the translated native code can be called by DVM. Both AOTC and JITC have their strength and weakness. In order to combine the strength and avoid the weakness of AOTC and JITC, in Icing, we have proposed a cost model to determine whether a method should be handled by AOTC or JITC during profiling. To evaluate the performance of Icing, four benchmarks used by Google JITC are used as test cases. The performance results show that, with Icing, the execution time of an application is two to three times faster than that without JITC, and 25% to 110% faster than that with JITC.
Language
English
Source (journal)
PROCEEDINGS OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE 14TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPILERS, ARCHITECTURES AND SYNTHESIS FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS (CASES '11)
Source (book)
14th Confernece on Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis for Embedded, Systems (CASES), OCT 09-14, 2011, Taipei, TAIWAN
Publication
New york : Assoc computing machinery , 2011
ISBN
978-1-4503-0713-0
Volume/pages
(2011) , p. 15-24
ISI
000397432700004
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Publication type
Subject
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 16.11.2018
Last edited 16.02.2023
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