research-article

CHERI Performance Enhancement for a Bytecode Interpreter

Authors:

Duncan Lowther,

Jeremy SingerAuthors Info & Claims

VMIL 2023: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3623507.3623552

Published: 19 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

During our port of the MicroPython bytecode interpreter to the CHERI-based Arm Morello platform, we encountered a number of serious performance degradations. This paper explores several of these performance issues in detail, in each case we characterize the cause of the problem, the fix, and the corresponding interpreter performance improvement over a set of standard Python benchmarks.

While we recognize that Morello is a prototypical physical instantiation of the CHERI concept, we show that it is possible to eliminate certain kinds of software-induced runtime overhead that occur due to the larger size of CHERI capabilities (128 bits) relative to native pointers (generally 64 bits). In our case, we reduce a geometric mean benchmark slowdown from 5x (before optimization) to 1.7x (after optimization) relative to AArch64, non-capability, execution. The worst-case slowdowns are greatly improved, from 100x (before optimization) to 2x (after optimization).

The key insight is that implicit pointer size presuppositions pervade systems code; whereas previous CHERI porting projects highlighted compile-time and execution-time errors exposed by pointer size assumptions, we instead focus on the performance implications of such assumptions.

References

[1]

Arm. 2021. Arm Architecture Reference Manual Supplement — Morello for A-profile Architecture. https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0606/

[2]

Jacob Bramley, Dejice Jacob, Andrei Lascu, Jeremy Singer, and Laurence Tratt. 2023. Picking a CHERI Allocator: Security and Performance Considerations. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management. 111–123. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591195.3595278

Digital Library

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Brooks Davis, Robert N. M. Watson, Alexander Richardson, Peter G. Neumann, Simon W. Moore, John Baldwin, David Chisnall, Jessica Clarke, Nathaniel Wesley Filardo, Khilan Gudka, Alexandre Joannou, Ben Laurie, A. Theodore Markettos, J. Edward Maste, Alfredo Mazzinghi, Edward Tomasz Napierala, Robert M. Norton, Michael Roe, Peter Sewell, Stacey Son, and Jonathan Woodruff. 2019. CheriABI: Enforcing Valid Pointer Provenance and Minimizing Pointer Privilege in the POSIX C Run-Time Environment. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. 379–393. https://doi.org/10.1145/3297858.3304042

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Damien P. George. 2013. MicroPython. https://micropython.org

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Brendan Gregg. 2016. The Flame Graph. Commun. ACM, 59, 6 (2016), may, 48–57. issn:0001-0782 https://doi.org/10.1145/2909476

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Brendan Gregg. 2016. The Flame Graph: This Visualization of Software Execution is a New Necessity for Performance Profiling and Debugging. Queue, 14, 2 (2016), mar, 91–110. issn:1542-7730 https://doi.org/10.1145/2927299.2927301

Digital Library

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Brett Gutstein. 2022. Memory safety with CHERI capabilities: security analysis, language interpreters, and heap temporal safety. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. https://doi.org/10.48456/tr-975

[8]

Duncan Lowther, Dejice Jacob, and Jeremy Singer. 2023. Morello MicroPython: A Python Interpreter for CHERI. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes. https://doi.org/10.1145/3617651.3622991

Digital Library

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Stefan Marr, Benoit Daloze, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. 2016. Cross-Language Compiler Benchmarking: Are We Fast Yet? In Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Dynamic Languages. 120–131. https://doi.org/10.1145/2989225.2989232

Digital Library

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Jeremy Singer. 2023. Towards Secure MicroPython on Morello (WIP). In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems. 134–137. https://doi.org/10.1145/3589610.3596272

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Robert NM Watson, Jonathan Woodruff, Peter G Neumann, Simon W Moore, Jonathan Anderson, David Chisnall, Nirav Dave, Brooks Davis, Khilan Gudka, and Ben Laurie. 2015. CHERI: A hybrid capability-system architecture for scalable software compartmentalization. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 20–37.

Digital Library

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Robert N. M. Watson, Graeme Barnes, Jessica Clarke, Richard Grisenthwaite, Peter Sewell, Simon W. Moore, and Jonathan Woodruff. 2023. Arm Morello Programme: Architectural security goals and known limitations. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. https://doi.org/10.48456/tr-982

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Robert N. M. Watson, Jessica Clarke, Peter Sewell, Jonathan Woodruff, Simon W. Moore, Graeme Barnes, Richard Grisenthwaite, Kathryn Stacer, Silviu Baranga, and Alexander Richardson. [n. d.]. Early performance results from the prototype Morello microarchitecture. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, United Kingdom, phone +44 1223 763500.

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Robert N. M. Watson, Ben Laurie, and Alex Richardson. 2021. Assessing the Viability of an Open-Source CHERI Desktop Software. https://www.capabilitieslimited.co.uk/_files/ugd/f4d681_e0f23245dace466297f20a0dbd22d371.pdf

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Robert N. M. Watson, Peter G. Neumann, Jonathan Woodruff, Michael Roe, Hesham Almatary, Jonathan Anderson, John Baldwin, Graeme Barnes, David Chisnall, Jessica Clarke, Brooks Davis, Lee Eisen, Nathaniel Wesley Filardo, Richard Grisenthwaite, Alexandre Joannou, Ben Laurie, A. Theodore Markettos, Simon W. Moore, Steven J. Murdoch, Kyndylan Nienhuis, Robert Norton, Alexander Richardson, Peter Rugg, Peter Sewell, Stacey Son, and Hongyan Xia. 2020. Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions: CHERI Instruction-Set Architecture (Version 8). University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. https://doi.org/10.48456/tr-951

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Jonathan Woodruff, Alexandre Joannou, Hongyan Xia, Anthony Fox, Robert M. Norton, David Chisnall, Brooks Davis, Khilan Gudka, Nathaniel W. Filardo, A. Theodore Markettos, Michael Roe, Peter G. Neumann, Robert N. M. Watson, and Simon W. Moore. 2019. CHERI Concentrate: Practical Compressed Capabilities. IEEE Trans. Comput., 68, 10 (2019), April, 1455–1469. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2019.2914037

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Jonathan Woodruff, Robert N.M. Watson, David Chisnall, Simon W. Moore, Jonathan Anderson, Brooks Davis, Ben Laurie, Peter G. Neumann, Robert Norton, and Michael Roe. 2014. The CHERI Capability Model: Revisiting RISC in an Age of Risk. In Proceeding of the 41st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecuture. 457–468. https://doi.org/10.1145/2678373.2665740

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Cited By

Lowther DJacob DSinger JBruno RMoss E(2023)Morello MicroPython: A Python Interpreter for CHERIProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3617651.3622991(62-69)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617651.3622991

Index Terms

CHERI Performance Enhancement for a Bytecode Interpreter
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security
      1. Virtualization and security
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software performance

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cover image ACM Conferences

VMIL 2023: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages

October 2023

99 pages

ISBN:9798400704017

DOI:10.1145/3623507

General Chairs:
Andrea Rosà
USI Lugano, Switzerland
,
Martin Henz
National University of Singapore, Singapore

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Published: 19 October 2023

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VMIL '23: 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages

October 23, 2023

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Cited By

Lowther DJacob DSinger JBruno RMoss E(2023)Morello MicroPython: A Python Interpreter for CHERIProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3617651.3622991(62-69)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617651.3622991

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