FPGA based hardware-software co-designed dynamic binary translation system

Abstract

Binary translation is used to allow applications of one instruction set architecture (ISA) to run on another, thereby maintaining the binary level compatibility across ISAs. Conventional software binary translation systems suffer performance loss because of architectural heterogeneity amongst ISAs, control flow translation and context switches. In this paper, we propose an FPGA based hardware-software co-designed dynamic binary translation (DBT) system, which moderates these issues at a low level of hardware cost. In our DBT system, we propose a MIPS condition code flags register and a modest ISA extension to bridge the architectural gap, a hardware address mapping mechanism to accelerate the handling of control flow instructions, and a scratchpad memory to reduce performance loss during context switches. We implement the system on Xilinx XC5VLX110T. Quantitative experiments reveal that the overall performance improvement is 56.1% over the baseline configuration, with only extra 1.4% of slices and 5.4% of BRAMs of Xilinx XC5VLX110T occupied.