Design for most compatible booting model of integrated memory-disk based on ARM linux

Abstract

Storage Class Memory (SCM) such as STT-RAM, PCRAM, and ReRAM can be used as a DRAM or a NAND Flash memory. Owing to the nonvolatile characteristic of SCM, its use as main memory can reduce the overhead during boot code loading and decompression whenever the system is switched on. Thus, a system with non-volatile memory suffers from less overhead during booting than a system with DRAM. The purpose of this study is to design a new booting model by analyzing the kernel ELF file and disassembling the current booting sequence for a more compatible startup model. To achieve this goal, we disassembled the ELF file format including the characteristics of the kernel binary. To verify the effectiveness of our theoretical model, the time cost in each step was measured using several different methods in our experimental setup. The results show that our approach reduces the time cost by approximately 45.25%. Keywords: booting sequence, non-volatile memory, kernel, ELF file.