Prof. Dr. Frank Bellosa, Konrad Miller

Abstract:

Page duplication is often referred to as a problem of virtualized environments. In this theses we argue that there are memory saving opportunities on mobile devices - in this case on an Android device, too.

As loading kernel modules is problematic on Android devices (no root access and/or the kernel does not support loading modules) we decided to measure by analyzing the memory dump of the device. We use an emulated Android device [4], therefore we can easily acquire the memory content from outside of the (virtual) device. Our measurement method does not require any modification to the device or manual search in the dump; all information is automatically extracted by reverse engineering the structures found in the memory dump.

The information we can assign to each page includes the process id(s), virtual and physical addresses, attached file (for named pages) and access rights. We are also able to distinguish between used and free pages (i.e. marked as unused in the kernel). Our evaluation depicts the total sharing opportunities and the opportunities within certain groups (e.g., the Dalvík Virtual Machine (Dalvík vm)).

BibTex:

@studythesis{julino12pageduplication,
 author = {Jonas Julino},
 title = {Analysing Page Duplication on Android},
 type = {Study Thesis},
 address = {System Architecture Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany},
 month = mar # "27",
 year = 2012,
 url = {http://os.ibds.kit.edu/}
 }