LLBT

Abstract

Lack of applications has always been a serious concern for designing machines with a new but incompatible ISA. To address this concern, binary translation is one common technique to migrate applications from one legacy ISA to new ones. In the past, dynamic binary translation (DBT) has been more widely adopted for migrating applications since it avoids some challenging problems for binary translation such as code discovery for variable length ISA and code location issues for handling indirect branches. Static binary translation (SBT) is usually regarded as a less general solution and has not been actively researched on. However, SBT has advantages of performing more aggressive optimizations, which could yield more compact code and greater code quality. In general, SBT translated applications are likely to consume less memory, processor cycles and power, and can be started more quickly. All the above advantages are more critical for embedded systems than for general systems. Therefore, we believe that even though SBT is not as general as DBT, it has a unique role to play for migrating applications in embedded systems.