Automatic feature selection in large-scale system-software product lines

Abstract

System software can typically be configured at compile time via a comfortable feature-based interface to tailor its functionality towards a specific use case. However, with the growing number of features, this tailoring process becomes increasingly difficult: As a prominent example, the Linux kernel in v3.14 provides nearly 14 000 configuration options to choose from. Even developers of embedded systems refrain from trying to build a minimized distinctive kernel configuration for their device – and thereby waste memory and money for unneeded functionality. In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic use-case specific tailoring of system software for special-purpose embedded systems. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on the example of Linux by generating tailored kernels for well-known applications of the Rasperry Pi and a Google Nexus 4 smartphone. Compared to the original configurations, our approach leads to memory savings of 15–70 percent and requires only very little manual intervention.