Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

CrossDBT: An LLVM-Based User-Level Dynamic Binary Translation Emulator

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Euro-Par 2022: Parallel Processing (Euro-Par 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13440))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 1959 Accesses

Abstract

Emulation of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is necessary for a wide variety of use cases, such as providing the compatibility to execute programs compiled for a different ISA. This issue is usually solved using Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT), where guest machine code is translated to host ISA on runtime and Just-in-time (JIT) compilation is performed to achieve high-performance emulation. QEMU, a famous emulator, is developed to solve this issue, where Tiny Code Generator (TCG) is constructed to translate guest binary code to TCG Intermediate Representation (IR), and then generate target ISA machine code from TCG IR. Due to the limitations of TCG, some extensions, such as HQEMU, use LLVM as the backend to optimize programs and generate high-performance machine code. However, HQEMU is limited by its underlying implementation. That is, HQEMU still translates guest binary code to TCG IR at first. In this paper, we develop a novel, LLVM-based emulator, where guest machine code is directly lifted to LLVM IR to reduce the extra overhead and produce high-quality machine code. We evaluate our DBT emulator using BYTEmark benchmark and demonstrating its ability to outperform the de facto standard QEMU DBT system. The evaluation results confirm that our emulator delivers an average speedup of 3.3x over QEMU across BYTEmark benchmark compiled for x86-64 running on an ARMv8 platform, meanwhile, demonstrate that our user-level DBT emulator can significantly reduce the overhead to run a program on a cross-ISA system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bala, V., Duesterwald, E., Banerjia, S.: Dynamo: a transparent dynamic optimization system. SIGPLAN Not. 35(5), 1–12 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1145/358438.349303

  2. Barham, P., et al.: Xen and the art of virtualization. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP 2003, pp. 164–177. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2003). https://doi.org/10.1145/945445.945462

  3. Bellard, F.: QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator. In: 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 2005), Anaheim, CA. USENIX Association, April 2005

    Google Scholar 

  4. Brandner, F., Fellnhofer, A., Krall, A., Riegler, D.: Fast and accurate simulation using the LLVM compiler framework. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools, RAPIDO, vol. 9, pp. 1–6 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bruening, D., Amarasinghe, S.: Efficient, transparent, and comprehensive runtime code manipulation. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bruening, D., Garnett, T., Amarasinghe, S.: An infrastructure for adaptive dynamic optimization. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: Feedback-Directed and Runtime Optimization, CGO 2003, pp. 265–275. IEEE Computer Society, USA (2003). https://doi.org/10.5555/776261.776290

  7. Chapman, M., Magenheimer, D.J., Ranganathan, P.: Magixen: combining binary translation and virtualization. HP Enterprise Systems and Software Laboratory, pp. 1–15 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chipounov, V., Candea, G.: Dynamically translating x86 to LLVM using QEMU. Technical report, EPFL (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Cifuentes, C., Lewis, B., Ung, D.: Walkabout-a retargetable dynamic binary translation framework. In: Workshop on Binary Translation, pp. 22–25 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  10. d’Antras, A., Gorgovan, C., Garside, J., Goodacre, J., Luján, M.: Hypermambo-x64: using virtualization to support high-performance transparent binary translation. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2017, pp. 228–241. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3050748.3050756

  11. Dehnert, J.C., et al.: The transmeta code morphing™ software: using speculation, recovery, and adaptive retranslation to address real-life challenges. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: Feedback-Directed and Runtime Optimization, CGO 2003, pp. 15–24. IEEE Computer Society, USA (2003). https://doi.org/10.5555/776261.776263

  12. Ding, J.H., Chang, P.C., Hsu, W.C., Chung, Y.C.: PQEMU: a parallel system emulator based on QEMU. In: 2011 IEEE 17th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, pp. 276–283 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPADS.2011.102

  13. Engelke, A., Okwieka, D., Schulz, M.: Efficient LLVM-based dynamic binary translation. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2021, pp. 165–171. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2021). https://doi.org/10.1145/3453933.3454022

  14. Engelke, A., Schulz, M.: Instrew: leveraging LLVM for high performance dynamic binary instrumentation. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2020, pp. 172–184. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3381052.3381319

  15. Hong, D.Y., et al.: HQEMU: a multi-threaded and retargetable dynamic binary translator on multicores. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, CGO 2012, pp. 104–113. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2259016.2259030

  16. Hsu, C.C., et al.: LNQ: building high performance dynamic binary translators with existing compiler backends. In: 2011 International Conference on Parallel Processing, pp. 226–234 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPP.2011.57

  17. Kivity, A., Kamay, Y., Laor, D., Lublin, U., Liguori, A.: KVM: the Linux virtual machine monitor. In: Proceedings of the Linux Symposium, Dttawa, Dntorio, Canada, vol. 1, pp. 225–230 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Knowles, P.: Transitive and quicktransit overview (2008). https://www.linux-kvm.org/images/9/98/KvmForum2008%24kdf2008_2.pdf

  19. Lattner, C., Adve, V.: LLVM: a compilation framework for lifelong program analysis and transformation. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: Feedback-Directed and Runtime Optimization, CGO 2004, p. 75. IEEE Computer Society, USA (2004). https://doi.org/10.5555/977395.977673

  20. Luk, C.K., et al.: Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2005, pp. 190–200. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2005). https://doi.org/10.1145/1065010.1065034

  21. Lyu, Y.H., et al.: DBILL: an efficient and retargetable dynamic binary instrumentation framework using LLVM backend. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2014, pp. 141–152. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2576195.2576213

  22. Nethercote, N., Seward, J.: Valgrind: a framework for heavyweight dynamic binary instrumentation. In: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2007, pp. 89–100. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2007). https://doi.org/10.1145/1250734.1250746

  23. Ottoni, G., Hartin, T., Weaver, C., Brandt, J., Kuttanna, B., Wang, H.: Harmonia: a transparent, efficient, and harmonious dynamic binary translator targeting the intel® architecture. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, CF 2011. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/2016604.2016635

  24. Probst, M.: Dynamic binary translation. In: UKUUG Linux Developer’s Conference, vol. 2002 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Shigenobu, K., Ootsu, K., Ohkawa, T., Yokota, T.: A translation method of arm machine code to LLVM-IR for binary code parallelization and optimization. In: 2017 Fifth International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR), pp. 575–579 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/CANDAR.2017.75

  26. Souza, M., Nicácio, D., Araújo, G.: ISAMAP: instruction mapping driven by dynamic binary translation. In: Varbanescu, A.L., Molnos, A., van Nieuwpoort, R. (eds.) ISCA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6161, pp. 117–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24322-6_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Spink, T., Wagstaff, H., Franke, B.: Hardware-accelerated cross-architecture full-system virtualization. ACM Trans. Archit. Code Optim. 13(4), 1–25 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2996798

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Spink, T., Wagstaff, H., Franke, B.: A retargetable system-level DBT hypervisor. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 36(4), 1–24 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3386161

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Tröger, J.: Specification-driven dynamic binary translation. Ph.D. thesis, Queensland University of Technology (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Witchel, E., Rosenblum, M.: Embra: fast and flexible machine simulation. In: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 1996, pp. 68–79. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (1996). https://doi.org/10.1145/233013.233025

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This work is supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No.2018YFB1700203), and by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 62132007 as well as gifts from Huawei.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Wei Li, Xiaohui Luo, Yiran Zhang, Qingkai Meng & Fengyuan Ren

Authors
  1. Wei Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Xiaohui Luo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yiran Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Qingkai Meng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Fengyuan Ren
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fengyuan Ren .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    José Cano

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Phil Trinder

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Li, W., Luo, X., Zhang, Y., Meng, Q., Ren, F. (2022). CrossDBT: An LLVM-Based User-Level Dynamic Binary Translation Emulator. In: Cano, J., Trinder, P. (eds) Euro-Par 2022: Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13440. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12597-3_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12597-3_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-12596-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-12597-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics