Binary translation

Summary

In computing, binary translation is a form of binary recompilation where sequences of instructions are translated from a source instruction set to the target instruction set. In some cases such as instruction set simulation, the target instruction set may be the same as the source instruction set, providing testing and debugging features such as instruction trace, conditional breakpoints and hot spot detection. The two main types are static and dynamic binary translation. Translation can be done in hardware (for example, by circuits in a CPU) or in software (e.g. run-time engines, static recompiler, emulators). Motivation Binary translation is motivated by a lack of a binary for a target platform, the lack of source code to compile for the target platform, or otherwise difficulty in compiling the source for the target platform. Statically-recompiled binaries run potentially faster than their respective emulated binaries, as the emulation overhead is removed. This is si

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_translation

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Performance Profiling in a Virtualized Environment

Jiaqing Du, Willy Zwaenepoel

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for cloud computing. Many applications deployed in a cloud run in virtual machines. However, profilers based on CPU performance counters do not work well in a virtualized environment. In this paper, we explore the possibilities for achieving performance profiling in virtual machine monitors (VMMs) built on paravirtualization, hardware assistance, and binary translation. We present the design and implementation of performance profiling for a VMM based on the x86 hardware extensions, with some preliminary experimental results.

2010

Performance Profiling of Virtual Machines

Jiaqing Du, Willy Zwaenepoel

Profilers based on hardware performance counters are indispensable for performance debugging of complex software systems. All modern processors feature hardware performance counters, but current virtual machine monitors (VMMs) do not properly expose them to the guest operating systems. Existing profiling tools require privileged access to the VMM to profile the guest and are only available for VMMs based on paravirtualization. Diagnosing performance problems of software running in a virtualized environment is therefore quite difficult. This paper describes how to extend VMMs to support performance profiling. We present two types of profiling in a virtualized environment: guest-wide profiling and system-wide profiling. Guest-wide profiling shows the runtime behavior of a guest. The profiler runs in the guest and does not require privileged access to the VMM. System-wide profiling exposes the runtime behavior of both the VMM and any number of guests. It requires profilers both in the VMM and in those guests. Not every VMM has the right architecture to support both types of profiling. We determine the requirements for each of them, and explore the possibilities for their implementation in virtual machines using hardware assistance, paravirtualization, and binary translation. We implement both guest-wide and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on the x86 hardware virtualization extensions and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on binary translation. We demonstrate that these profilers provide good accuracy with only limited overhead.

2011

Computer architecture manuals describe the instruction set of the machine and the semantics of those instructions by a combination of natural language and ISP (Instruction Set Processor) descriptions. The syntax of the instructions in assembly is well define in the form of tables in the manual. However, the semantics is not so well specified and descriptions vary widely from one manual to another. When developing a retargetable binary translator, as much as possible needs to be specified in order to automatically generate code from specifications, hence separating machine-independent issues from the manual coding stage. The specification of the semantics of machine instructions is one such task, with the aim of generating suitable code for an intermediate representation that is to be used during the analysis stage. We describe the design process used to develop a semantic specification language, SSL, to integrate into a retargetable binary translation framework. The techniques described herein are suitable not just to binary translators but also to machine-code manipulation tools such as optimizing compilers, binary profilers, instrumentors, and binary debuggers.

IEEE Computer Society1998