A Light-weight Code Cache Design for Dynamic Binary Translation

Abstract

Interpretation and basic block translation (BBT) are two typical strategies for cold code emulation in a dynamic binary translation (DBT) system. More and more DBT systems employ BBT as the generated native code runs more efficient than the interpretation routines. We observe that BBT’s high efficiency is based on those special hardware assists. With certain simple hardware techniques, interpretation could outperform BBT. In our pervious work, we proposed a hardware interpreted code cache (Pcache) mechanism to speedup interpretation by saving the decoded instruction information during interpretation. This light-weight code cache design could be extended to assist the hotspots translation, thus further reduce the DBT systems’ overhead. We add the translation entry into the Pcache design thus saving most decoding operations during translation. We use eight SPEC 2000 integer benchmarks on our DBT simulator. Results show that the modified Pcache design causes a speedup of 1.94 according to the referenced DBT with basic interpretation and the interpretation based DBT system assisted by the modified Pcache performs more efficiently than the DBT system which employs BBT for the cold code.