Code Lifetime-Based Memory Reduction for Virtual Execution Environments

The need for adaptability in a rapidly expanding embedded systems market makes it important to design Virtual Execution Environments (VEEs) specifically targeting embedded platforms. The authors believe the first step in this direction should be to replace the performance focus of traditional VEE design with a combined memory and performance focus, given the memory constraints on embedded systems. In this paper, they present techniques that reduce the large code cache sizes of VEEs by continually eliminating dead cached code as the guest application executes. They use both a time-based heuristic and an execution count-based heuristic to predict code lifetime.