DDGacc: boosting dynamic DDG-based binary optimizations through specialized hardware support

Dynamic Binary Translators (DBT) and Dynamic Binary Optimization (DBO) by software are used widely for several reasons including performance, design simplification and virtualization. However, the software layer in such systems introduces nonnegligible overheads which affect performance and user experience. Hence, reducing DBT/DBO overheads is of paramount importance. In addition, reduced overheads have interesting collateral effects in the rest of the software layer, such as allowing optimizations to be applied earlier. A cost-effective solution to this problem is to provide hardware support to speed up the primitives of the software layer, paying special attention to automate DBT/DBO mechanisms and leave the heuristics to the software, which is more flexible. In this work, we have characterized the overheads of a DBO system using DynamoRIO implementing several basic optimizations. We have seen that the computation of the Data Dependence Graph (DDG) accounts for 5%-10% of the execu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Demos Pavlou, Enric Gibert, Fernando Latorre, Antonio González
• Keywords: Cost Effective Solution, Dependence Graph, Pipeline Processor, VEE 2012, Virtualization