Operating System Kernel Level Binary Translation System Design And Optimization

At present, with the innovation of computer architecture, Software compatibility issue has become increasingly prominent. The source of software compatibility issue is that, an executable binary file compiled for one computer architecture (such as X86architecture) can’t run on another computer with different architecture (such as a computer with MIPS architecture). Software compatibility has affected hardware designing, software developing and user experience.The key technology to run software on different architectures is binary translation which can translate an instruction stream based on one ISA (Instruction System Architecture) into the corresponding instruction stream based on another ISA. Binary translation can be regarded as a special compiling technology. Traditional compilers translate high level programing language program into executable instructions for an ISA, but a binary translater translates executable instructions for one ISA to executable instructions for another ISA.With the rising of cloud computing, binary translation systems become more and more important. But, in practice, there are several problems restricting the using of binary translation systems:1) additional work overload is introduced by the binary translation system,2) the efficiency is reduced because of the low equality of translation,3) the difference between target ISA and host ISA reduces the efficiency,4) the support of software with operation system kernel modules is not quite perfect.To solve the problems before, this paper takes the design and implement of operation system kernel level binary translation system as the center, and covers performance and function. On one hand, this paper researches how to optimize the performance of the binary translation system using operation system kernel’s features, on the other hand, this paper extents the functions of the binary translation system to support new execution models. The research contents and innovations can be summarized as follows:1) Designed and implemented an operating system kernel level binary translation system, compared with traditional binary translation systems, this system has different execution model. The operation system kernel’s features can bring new break-points to the optimization of binary translation systems. 2) Proposed a level based virtual machine instruction indexing strategy which can fully exploit the capacity of modern computer hardware. Based on the special locality of the virtual machine back-end instruction and the level based storage system of modern computers, this strategy significantly reduces the overhead of the instruction addressing.3) Designed a new binary translation method. This method can translate operation system kernel modules directly. Compared with traditional binary translation systems, this method reduces the number of instructions that need to be translated, and significantly improved the performance of the binary translation system.4) Designed new hardware devices’virtualization strategy. This strategy uses real host hardware devices to vitualize the target hardware devices, reducing the work overload of the software.5) Designed new translation rules based on Loongson CPU. These rules use the dynamical execution information collected by the dynamic binary translation system, tested and analysed the binary translation system back-end instructions’execution law. Based on this, optimized the translation rules of the binary translation system targeting on Loongon CPU. These rules reduce the translated instructions and improve the efficiency of the system.All the works of this paper have been used by Loonson binary translation system, and have improved the execution performance of Windows operation system and X86software on Loongson computers.