Efficient binary translation system with low hardware cost

Abstract

Binary translation is one of the most important approaches for system migration. However, software binary translation systems often suffer from the inefficiency and traditional hardware-software co-designed virtual machines require the unavoidable re-design of the processor architecture. This paper presents a novel hardware-software co-designed method to accelerate the binary translation on an existing architecture. The hardware supports for source-architecture-only functions, partial decodes and binary translation system acceleration are proposed. These hardware supports help the binary translation system to achieve high performance and simplify the design of the binary translation software. In the meantime, the hardware cost is well controlled in a certain low level. These supports are implemented in Godson-3 processors to speedup the x86 binary translation to the native MIPS instruction set. Performance evaluations on RTL simulation and FPGA emulation platforms show that the proposed method can speedup most benchmark programs by nearly 10 times compared to pure software-based binary translation and achieves about 70% performance of the native program execution. The chip is fabricated in ST 65nm CMOS technology, and the physical design results show that the chip area cost is less than 5%.