MT-BTRIMER: A Master-Slave Multi-threaded Dynamic Binary Translator

摘要

Dynamic binary translation technology (DBT) offers a solution for automatically converting an executable compiled for one platform to run on other platforms without recompiling the source code. Unfortunately, most of the current DBT systems are single-threaded and many orders of magnitude slower than native execution. Although multi-core processors are becoming more and more prevalent in modern computing environments, the single-threaded architecture prevents these DBT systems from improving their performance by making full use of the parallel execution advantage. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a multi-threaded DBT system, which is named MT-BTRIMER. The design of MT-BTRIMER is different from current multi-threaded DBT systems in that MT-BTRIMER uses a master-slave multi-threaded architecture. In this architecture, the master thread is responsible for both target code execution and normal translation, and the slave threads are in charge of speculative translation. MT-BTRIMER accelerates its execution by offloading some translation work into its slave threads which can translate a good portion of target code in advance. We evaluated the MT-BTRIMER system across SPEC CINT 2000 and BYTEmark test suite. The result demonstrates that MT-BTRIMER can speculatively translate on average 60% of useful target code, and reduce the total execution time by nearly 30% compared with ST-BTRIMER which is a single-threaded DBT system.