Toward a Component-Based Embedded Java-Oriented Operating System

This papers presents a Java-oriented operating system framework targeted at resource-constrained embedded environments. This framework relies on a component-based architecture that allows a specific OS profile to be constructed by assembling fine-grained system components. Such a modular approach yields several advantages: the ability to customize the operating system according to the specific requirements of the execution environment or target applications, a strong integration of the Java virtual machinery with the OS layer with no abstraction mismatch between the two and the ability to monitor the system in a non-intrusive way. Our framework resorts to a component-aware ahead-of-time compilation of Java bytecode that performs global optimization techniques in order to keep the overhead of the component framework minimal.