Execute in place

In computer science, execute in place (XIP) is a method of executing programs directly from long-term storage rather than copying it into RAM. It is an extension of using shared memory to reduce the total amount of memory required.

Its general effect is that the program text consumes no writable memory, saving it for dynamic data, and that all instances of the program are run from a single copy.

For this to work, several criteria have to be met:

The storage requirements are usually met by using NOR flash memory or EEPROM, which can be byte-addressed for read operations, although it is a bit slower than normal system RAM in most setups.

In x86 systems, typically the first-stage bootloader is an XIP program that is linked to run at the address at which the flash chip(s) are mapped at power-up. It contains a minimal program to set up the system RAM (which depends on the components used on the individual boards and cannot be generalized enough so that the proper sequence could be embedded into the processor hardware) and then loads the second-stage bootloader or the OS kernel into RAM.

During this initialization, writable memory may not be available, so all computations have to be performed within the processor registers. For this reason, first stage boot loaders tend to be written in assembly language and only do the minimum to provide a normal execution environment for the next program. Some processors either embed a small amount of SRAM in the chip itself, or allow using the onboard cache memory as RAM, to make this first stage boot loader easier to write using high-level language.

For a kernel or bootloader, address space generally is assigned internally, so in order to use XIP for them, it is sufficient to instruct the linker to place unmodifiable and modifiable data in different address ranges and provide a mechanism for the modifiable data to be copied to writable memory before any code is run that assumes that data can be accessed normally. This can be done as part of the previous stage, or within a small code segment at the beginning of the program.

If address space is assigned externally, such as in an application program that is run on a system that does not provide virtual memory, the compiler needs to access all modifiable data by adding an offset to a pointer to a private copy of the data area. In this case, the external loader is responsible for setting up the instance specific memory areas.