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Evaluating indirect branch handling mechanisms in software dynamic translation systems

2011; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/1970386.1970390

1544-3973

Jason D. Hiser, Daniel Williams, Wei Hu, Jack W. Davidson, Jason Mars, Bruce R. Childers,

Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Software Dynamic Translation (SDT) is used for instrumentation, optimization, security, and many other uses. A major source of SDT overhead is the execution of code to translate an indirect branch's target address into the translated destination block's address. This article discusses sources of Indirect Branch (IB) overhead in SDT systems and evaluates techniques for overhead reduction. Measurements using SPEC CPU2000 show that the appropriate choice and configuration of IB translation mechanisms can significantly reduce the overhead. Further, cross-architecture evaluation of these mechanisms reveals that the most efficient implementation and configuration can be highly dependent on the architecture implementation.