UQBT: Adaptive Binary Translation at Low Cost

Developments in the semiconductor industry have made possible smaller and faster processors for general-purpose computing, portable devices, multipurpose appliances, and system-on-chip designs. Binary translation offers a quick, inexpensive way to migrate software from one processor to another. Although binary-translation techniques are still in their infancy compared to their compiler counterparts, engineers have been using them for 15 years. Just as engineers build compilers partly on the basis of specifications, the authors are developing the University of Queensland Binary Translator (UQBT) on the basis of machine specifications and properties of machines and operating systems. This static binary-translation framework supports various processors, including complex-instruction-set computers (CISC), reduced-instruction-set computers (RISC), and stack-based machines. The authors describe the UQBT framework and discuss their observations while using it to instantiate six different translators across Sun Sparc, Intel Pentium, and Java virtual-machine architectures.