Specialization tools and techniques for systematic optimization of system software

Specialization has been recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing o perating systems. However, specialization has not been broadly applied beyo nd the research community because current techniques, based on manual speci alization, are time-consuming and error-prone. The goal of the work describ ed in this paper is to help operating system tuners perform specialization more easily. We have built a specialization toolkit that assists the major tasks of specializing operating systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness o f the toolkit by applying it to three diverse operating system components. We show that using tools to assist specialization enables significant perfo rmance optimizations without error-prone manual modifications. Our experien ce with the toolkit suggests new ways of designing systems that combine hig h performance and clean structure.