Fast dynamic binary translation for the kernel
Piyus Kedia, Sorav Bansal · 2013
Dynamic binary translation (DBT) is a powerful technique with several important applications. System-level binary translators have been used for implementing a Virtual Machine Monitor [2] and for instrumentation in the OS kernel [10]. In current designs, the performance overhead of binary translation on kernel-intensive workloads is high. e.g., over 10x slowdowns were reported on the syscall nanobenchmark in [2], 2-5x slowdowns were reported on lmbench microbenchmarks in [10]. These overheads are primarily due to the extra work required to correctly handle kernel mechanisms like interrupts, exceptions, and physical CPU concurrency.