Dynamic binary translation (DBT) has been widely used as a means to run applications created for one instruction-set architecture (ISA) on top of processors with a different ISA. Given the great amount of legacy software developed for PCs, based on the Intel R Architecture (IA) ISA, a lot of attention has been given to translating IA to other ISAs. The recent trends in industry for both smaller ultra-mobile PCs and more powerful embedded and mobile internet devices (e.g. smartphones) are blurring the frontiers between these distinct markets. As a result, this market convergence is creating great interest in DBT from ISAs that currently dominate the embedded and mobile-internet-device markets (e.g. ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC) to IA. This paper investigates the main challenges that arise when targeting IA in a DBT. We identify the two key issues in efficiently translating from other ISAs to IA: IA's small number of registers, and its condition-code handling mechanism. To address these issues, we propose a combination of software and hardware solutions. Although motivated by IA, these techniques are not IA-specific, and they can be applied to other architectures with similar limitations to make them better DBT-targets. We have prototyped these techniques in Harmonia, an ARM-to-IA DBT tool based on open-source QEMU. Our experiments show that Harmonia achieves an average of 55% (up to 164%) of the performance of highly optimized native binaries, and an average speedup of 2.2× on top of the baseline QEMU.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.