EATBit: effective automated test for binary translation with high code coverage
Hui Guo, Zhenjiang Wang, Chenggang Wu, Ruining He · Design, Automation, and Test in Europe · 2014
Binary translation makes it convenient to emulate one instruction set by another. Nowadays, it is growing in popularity in various applications, especially the embedded platforms. When it comes to the test of binary translators, traditional methodologies which still mainly rely on manual unit test is costly, labor intensive and often not adequate to test complicated algorithms in the translators. Some standard benchmark suites, like SPEC CPU2006, are compiled with different compilation options for further tests. However, the translation modules still have over 30% of their code unexecuted after such tests, according to our experimental results. Methodologies based on randomization can generate a vast variety of tests, thus improve the code coverage in the translation system. In this paper, we propose such an approach named EATBit. Test binaries are generated with randomly selected instructions and operands. The binaries and a large amount of input data are then refined to exclude invalid ones. Experimental results on a real binary translator demonstrate that EATBit can not only improve code coverage by over 20%, but also find some new bugs in the translator successfully.