Improving Startup Performance in Dynamic Binary Translators

A Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) system dynamically translates program binaries built for a guest platform into code for the host machine that runs the program, one basic block at a time. Even after optimizations, auxiliary tasks performed alongside program emulation by the DBT system introduce performance overheads as compared to executing the program on the native guest platform. In this work, we analyze the extent and causes for a DBT system's startup performance latency. We then focus on understanding and alleviating the program translation cost that is a significant contributor to and disproportionately impacts the startup overhead. We propose and assess the potential of a new technique that parallelizes program translations on multi-core machines to reduce its evident run-time costs. We explain the challenges in achieving such parallelization and discuss and evaluate solutions.