Biotite: A High-Performance Static Binary Translator using Source-Level Information

Abstract

Research on novel Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) is actively pursued; however, it requires extensive efforts to develop and maintain comprehensive compilation toolchains for each new ISA. Binary translation can provide a practical solution for ISA researchers to port target programs to novel ISAs when such a level of toolchain support is not available. However, to ensure the correct handling of indirect jumps, existing binary translators rely on complex runtime systems, whose implementation on primitive research ISAs demands significant efforts. ISA researchers generally have access to additional source-level information, including the symbol table and source code, when using binary translators. The symbol table can provide potential jump targets for optimizing indirect jumps, and ISA-independent functions in source code can be directly compiled without translation. Leveraging source-level information as additional input, in this paper, we propose Biotite, a high-performance static binary translator that correctly handles arbitrary indirect jumps. Currently, Biotite supports the translation of RV64GC Linux binaries to self-contained LLVM IR. Our evaluation shows that Biotite successfully translates all benchmarks in SPEC CPU 2017 and achieves a 2.346× performance improvement over QEMU for the integer benchmark suite.