Instruction Emulation and OS Supports of a Hybrid Binary Translator for x86 Instruction Set Architecture

Abstract

Binary translation is one of the most important techniques of virtualization. The main purpose of a binary translator (BT) is to translate an executable from a source instruction set architecture (ISA) to a target ISA. Traditionally, there are two types of binary translators: static binary translator (SBT) and dynamic binary translator (DBT). In recent years, a new type of BT called hybrid binary translator (HBT) was proposed, which translates the source executable first at static time, and then, at run time, if the execution of the target executable emits an exception because of reaching statically untranslated code, it switches to the attached dynamic translator for translating these code. Therefore, an HBT may have the merits of both good performance of SBT and easy handling of code discovery and code location problems of DBT. Nowadays, massive application programs have been developed for x86 platforms, and thus, many binary translators have been proposed for x86 ISA. However, due to the characteristics of CISC architecture of x86, for example, variable-length instruction format, the BT designed for it previously usually apply dynamic translation strategy or make use of profiling data for resolving the code discovery and code location problems. In this paper, we present an HBT which supports x86 ISA and emulates the execution behavior of an x86 executable under Linux operation system. In our x86-32 to x86-64 translation experiments, the target executables translated by our HBT outperform that of QEMU on most programs of EEMBC benchmark suite.