A Selective Dynamic Compiler for Embedded Java Virtual Machine Targeting ARM Processors

by Mourad, Azzam

This work presents a new selective dynamic compilation technique targeting ARM

16/32-bit embedded system processors. This compiler is built inside the J2ME/CLDC

(Java 2 Micro Edition for Connected Limited Device Configuration) platform. The primary

objective of our work is to come up with an efficient, lightweight and low-footprint

accelerated Java virtual machine ready to be executed on embedded machines. This is

achieved by implementing a selective ARM dynamic compiler called Armed E-Bunny

into Sun’s Kilobyte Virtual Machine (KVM). We first present the Java platform, Java

2 Micro Edition (J2ME) for embedded systems and Java virtual machine components.

Then, we discuss the different acceleration techniques for Java virtual machine and

we detail the principle of dynamic compilation. After that we illustrate the architecture,

design, implementation and experimental results of our selective dynamic compiler

Armed E-Bunny. The modified KVM is ported on a handheld PDA and is tested using

standard J2ME benchmarks. The experimental results on its performance demonstrate

that a speedup of 360% over the last version of Sun’s KVM is accomplished with a

footprint overhead that does not exceed 119 kilobytes.