As computer processors and their hardware designs continuously evolve, operating systems provide many different assembly-level implementations for the same functionality. This enables support for new platforms and ensures backward compatibility for older ones at the same time. However, the source code of operating systems grows more complex and becomes much harder to maintain.

In the embedded domain, industrial sectors (i.e., automotive industry, avionics) are undergoing radical changes. They broadly adopt commodity hardware and move away from special-purpose control units. During this transition, heterogeneous software components are consolidated to run on commodity operating systems. To efficiently consolidate such components, a modular encapsulation of common functionality into reusable binary files (i.e., shared libraries) is essential. However, shared libraries are often unnecessarily large as they entail a lot of generic functionality that is not required in a narrowly defined scenario. As the source code of proprietary components is often unavailable and the industry is heading towards binary-only distribution, we propose an approach towards lightweight binary tailoring . As demonstrated in the evaluation, lightweight binary tailoring effectively reduces the amount of code in all shared libraries on a Linux-based system by 63 percent and shrinks their files by 17 percent. The reduction in size is beneficial to cut down costs (e.g., lower storage and memory footprint) and eases code analyses that are necessary for code audits.

System software can typically be configured at compile time via a comfortable feature-based interface to tailor its functionality towards a specific use case. However, with the growing number of features, this tailoring process becomes increasingly difficult: As a prominent example, the Linux kernel in v3.14 provides nearly 14 000 configuration options to choose from. Even developers of embedded systems refrain from trying to build a minimized distinctive kernel configuration for their device – and thereby waste memory and money for unneeded functionality. In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic use-case specific tailoring of system software for special-purpose embedded systems. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on the example of Linux by generating tailored kernels for well-known applications of the Rasperry Pi and a Google Nexus 4 smartphone. Compared to the original configurations, our approach leads to memory savings of 15–70 percent and requires only very little manual intervention.