Dynamic online reconfiguration for customizable and self-optimizing operating systems

When applications adapt their behavior to the requirements of the environment, their resource usage can change dramatically. The re-source usage implies the services that the applications require from the operating system. Thus, the operating system must either pro-vide all services that are totally required over time or reconfigure itself. Reconfiguration of the operating system means to support on demand services or the possibility to degrade services. We present an approach where we extend our offline customizable operating system in order to be dynamically reconfigurable during run-time. Additionally, we describe the procedure how the operating system is aware of the current required services. We claim that the re-source usage between the applications and the operating system is optimized. Thus, we derive a self-optimizing real-time operating system (SO-RTOS). This work concentrates on the integration of the configurator, which models the design space and controles the low-level reconfiguration, and the resource manager, which is re-sponsible for the timeliness and optimality. An optimization case study realized on a prototype validates our approach. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.7 [Operating Systems]: Real-time systems and embedded system