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Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) requires the implementation of load-link/store-conditional (LL/SC) primitives for guest systems that rely on this form of synchronization. When targeting e.g. x86 host systems, LL/SC guest instructions are typically emulated using atomic Compare-and-Swap (CAS) instructions on the host. Whilst this direct mapping is efficient, this approach is problematic due to subtle differences between LL/SC and CAS semantics. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is a real problem, and we provide code examples that fail to execute correctly on QEMU and a commercial DBT system, which both use the CAS approach to LL/SC emulation. We then develop two novel and provably correct LL/SC emulation schemes: (1) A purely software based scheme, which uses the DBT system’s page translation cache for correctly selecting between fast, but unsynchronized, and slow, but fully synchronized memory accesses, and (2) a hardware accelerated scheme that leverages hardware transactional memory (HTM) provided by the host. We have implemented these two schemes in the Synopsys DesignWare® ARC® nSIM DBT system, and we evaluate our implementations against full applications, and targeted micro-benchmarks. We demonstrate that our novel schemes are not only correct, but also deliver competitive performance on-par or better than the widely used, but broken CAS scheme. ...

System-level Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) provides the capability to boot an Operating System (OS) and execute programs compiled for an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) different to that of the host machine. Due to their performance-critical nature, system-level DBT frameworks are typically hand-coded and heavily optimized, both for their guest and host architectures. While this results in good performance of the DBT system, engineering costs for supporting a new, or extending an existing architecture are high. In this paper we develop a novel, retargetable DBT hypervisor, which includes guest specific modules generated from high-level guest machine specifications. Our system simplifies retargeting of the DBT, but it also delivers performance levels in excess of existing manually created DBT solutions. We achieve this by combining offline and online optimizations, and exploiting the freedom of a Just-in-time ( JIT) compiler operating in a bare-metal environment provided by a Virtual Machine (VM) hypervisor. We evaluate our DBT using both targeted micro-benchmarks as well as standard application benchmarks, and we demonstrate its ability to outperform the de-facto standard Qemu DBT system. Our system delivers an average speedup of 2.21× over Qemu across SPEC CPU2006 integer benchmarks running in a full-system Linux OS environment, compiled for the 64-bit ARMv8-A ISA and hosted on an x86-64 platform. For floating-point applications the speedup is even higher, reaching 6.49× on average. We demonstrate that our system-level DBT system significantly reduces the effort required to support a new ISA, while delivering outstanding performance. ...

Hardware virtualization solutions provide users with benefits ranging from application isolation through server consolidation to improved disaster recovery and faster server provisioning. While hardware assistance for virtualization is supported by all major processor architectures, including Intel, ARM, PowerPC & MIPS, these extensions are targeted at virtualization of the same architecture, e.g. an x86 guest on an x86 host system. Existing techniques for cross-architecture virtualization, e.g. an ARM guest on an x86 host, still incur a substantial overhead for CPU, memory and I/O virtualization due to the necessity for software emulation of these mismatched system components. In this article we present a new hardware accelerated hypervisor called CAPTIVE, employing a range of novel techniques, which exploit existing hardware virtualization extensions for improving the performance of full-system cross-platform virtualization. We illustrate how (1) guest MMU events and operations can be mapped onto host memory virtualization extensions, eliminating the need for costly software MMU emulation, (2) a block-based DBT engine inside the virtual machine can improve CPU virtualization performance, (3) memory mapped guest I/O can be efficiently translated to fast I/O specific calls to emulated devices, and (4) the cost for asynchronous guest interrupts can be reduced. For an ARM-based Linux guest system running on an x86 host with Intel VT support we demonstrate application performance levels, based on SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, of up to 5.88x over state-of-the-art QEMU and 2.5x on average, achieving a guest dynamic instruction throughput of up to 1280 MIPS and 915.52 MIPS, on average. ...