In this thesis, we studied a component-based software design for componentizing Linux kernel. Our goal is to componentize kernel modules and explicitly define the dependency relation of components in the kernel. Componentization can greatly improve composability, evolvability, extensibility and testability of a software system, and can thus increase the productivity of software development and reduce the cost of maintenance. On top of the componentized kernel, we developed a suite of tools to facilitate the operations on kernel components.
In the component-based design, the basic software unit is a component. We envision any subsystem in kernel as a composition of components. To realize the concept, we explicitly create the output ports by augmenting the symbol table of a kernel module to record the relocation information, i.e., the locations where the module invokes the functions exported by other modules. We developed tools to discover the data passing among components such that the dependency relation among components can be clearly disclosed. With componentization in place, we are able to implement the hot-swapping technique which allows the system structure to be dynamically changed at run time. The technique makes it possible to test, swap or re-compose components when part of the system cannot be terminated or removed.
The proposed system is implemented on Linux kernel 2.6.17.1. While our componentization does not introduce any time overhead when modules are in action, we evaluated our approach in terms of module loading time, memory consumption and hot-swapping time. We found that the module loading time and memory consumption of a componentized module are both proportional to the number of relocations in the module. The hot-swapping time is related to the position of the symbol to be swapped in the symbol table. All these suggest that we still have room to improve the way we realized the componentization in Linux kernel.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0718107-225207 |
| Date | 18 July 2007 |
| Creators | Fan, Shu-ming |
| Contributors | Ming-chao Chiang, Hung-ying Tyan, Tsang-ling Sheu |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0718107-225207 |
| Rights | campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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