research-article

Portable execution of legacy binaries on the Java virtual machine

Authors:

Alexander Yermolovich,

Michael FranzAuthors Info & Claims

PPPJ '08: Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java

Pages 63 - 72

https://doi.org/10.1145/1411732.1411742

Published: 09 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The move toward pure managed-code environments is held back by the vast amount of legacy software available only as statically compiled binaries for some legacy instruction set architecture (ISA). Catering to this legacy software requires all sorts of compromises, from the necessity of providing backward compatibility with dated instruction sets to the need for unsatisfactory mixed-mode environments, in which the legacy code runs "besides" (rather than on top of) the managed code platform. We have been investigating strategies for running legacy binaries on top of, rather than "besides", a managed code platform, by virtualizing the legacy ISA. Our system "upcompiles" low-level machine code to high-level Java code, which can then be executed on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). On JVMs that have a just-in-time compiler, our generated JVM bytecode is subsequently "downcompiled" again into the native code of the host machine (which may be identical or different from the starting ISA). Despite executing on top of the Java Virtual Machine, our system delivers performance comparable to commercial-strength dynamic translators such as QEMU that directly generate platform-dependant machine code.

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2956925
Kaufmann MSpallek R(2013)Superblock compilation and other optimization techniques for a Java-based DBT machine emulatorACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2517326.245152148:7(33-40)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517326.2451521
Kaufmann MSpallek RMuir SHeiser GBlackburn S(2013)Superblock compilation and other optimization techniques for a Java-based DBT machine emulatorProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments10.1145/2451512.2451521(33-40)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2451512.2451521
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Index Terms

Portable execution of legacy binaries on the Java virtual machine
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers

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cover image ACM Conferences

PPPJ '08: Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java

September 2008

198 pages

ISBN:9781605582238

DOI:10.1145/1411732

Conference Chairs:
Luis Veiga
Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal
,
Vasco Amaral
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 September 2008

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National Science Foundation

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PPPJ08

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ACM

PPPJ08: Principles and Practice of Prgramming in Java 2008

September 9 - 11, 2008

Modena, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 29 of 58 submissions, 50%

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Cited By

Ali KLai XLuo ZLhotak ODolby JTip F(2021)A Study of Call Graph Construction for JVM-Hosted LanguagesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.295692547:12(2644-2666)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2956925
Kaufmann MSpallek R(2013)Superblock compilation and other optimization techniques for a Java-based DBT machine emulatorACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2517326.245152148:7(33-40)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517326.2451521
Kaufmann MSpallek RMuir SHeiser GBlackburn S(2013)Superblock compilation and other optimization techniques for a Java-based DBT machine emulatorProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments10.1145/2451512.2451521(33-40)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2451512.2451521
Kaufmann MHäsing MPreußer TSpallek RProbst CWimmer C(2011)The Java Virtual Machine in retargetable, high-performance instruction set simulationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java10.1145/2093157.2093161(21-30)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2093157.2093161

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