research-article

DTT: program structure-aware indirect branch optimization via direct-TPC-table in DBT system

Authors:

Xu ChengAuthors Info & Claims

CF '14: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Computing Frontiers

Article No.: 12, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/2597917.2597944

Published: 20 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Indirect branch handling is a major source of performance overhead in Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) systems. Most existing solutions for indirect branches involve a run-time address translation from Source Program Counter (SPC) of the branch target to Translated Program Counter (TPC) at every execution of the indirect branches.

This paper analyzes the program structures that cause indirect branches, and finds out that most of the branch targets are prestored in the program's memory as some kind of address tables. In other words, the branch target of an indirect branch is not obtained by "calculating", but by "selecting" from the memory.

Based on this observation, we propose a program structure-aware indirect branch handling mechanism called Direct TPC Table (DTT). Our DTT approach probes the target address table of an indirect branch by a passive exception-based scheme, and generates a TPC table from the probed SPC address table at the translation time. Thus, the translated program can load the TPC of a branch target from the TPC table directly, which avoids performing an expensive SPC-to-TPC translation at every execution. In many cases, only 2 instructions are need to handle an indirect branch execution.

We implemented the DTT mechanism on a public x86 DBT system. The experiment shows that, DTT improves the system performance by 19.0% compared with hash lookup on a set of indirect intensive benchmarks. Furthermore, DTT does not depend on the underlying architecture or special hardware, so that it can be deployed on various platforms. Meanwhile, DTT can cooperate with other optimization technique of different DBT systems to enhance the performance.

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Cited By

Li CLiu ZShang YHe LYan X(2024)SPC-Indexed Indirect Branch Hardware Cache Redirecting Technique in Binary TranslationJournal of Circuits, Systems and Computers10.1142/S0218126624502426Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218126624502426
Li XLan YNiu GXue FZhang F(2024)BTBench: A Benchmark for Comprehensive Binary Translation Performance Evaluation2024 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00014(36-47)Online publication date: 5-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00014
Jiang JLiang CDong RYang ZZhou ZWang WYew PZhang WGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)A System-Level Dynamic Binary Translator using Automatically-Learned Translation RulesProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444850(423-434)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444850
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

DTT: program structure-aware indirect branch optimization via direct-TPC-table in DBT system
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments
      2. Source code generation

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CF '14: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Computing Frontiers

May 2014

305 pages

ISBN:9781450328708

DOI:10.1145/2597917

General Chair:
Pedro Trancoso
University of Cyprus, CY
,
Program Chairs:
Diana Franklin
University of California at Santa Barbara
,
Sally A. McKee
Chalmers University of Technology, SE

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 May 2014

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CF'14: Computing Frontiers Conference

May 20 - 22, 2014

Cagliari, Italy

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CF '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 62 submissions, 45%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 273 of 785 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

Li CLiu ZShang YHe LYan X(2024)SPC-Indexed Indirect Branch Hardware Cache Redirecting Technique in Binary TranslationJournal of Circuits, Systems and Computers10.1142/S0218126624502426Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218126624502426
Li XLan YNiu GXue FZhang F(2024)BTBench: A Benchmark for Comprehensive Binary Translation Performance Evaluation2024 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00014(36-47)Online publication date: 5-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00014
Jiang JLiang CDong RYang ZZhou ZWang WYew PZhang WGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)A System-Level Dynamic Binary Translator using Automatically-Learned Translation RulesProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444850(423-434)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444850
Kim CKim SCho HKim DKim JOh YJang HLee J(2016)Short-circuit dispatchACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/3007787.300116844:3(291-303)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3007787.3001168
d'Antras AGorgovan CGarside JLuján M(2016)Optimizing Indirect Branches in Dynamic Binary TranslatorsACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/286657313:1(1-25)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2866573
Kim CKim SCho HKim DKim JOh YJang HLee JMin SLoh G(2016)Short-circuit dispatchProceedings of the 43rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA.2016.34(291-303)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISCA.2016.34

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