Studying the Performance of the FX!32 Binary Translation System

For an emulation/translation environment to attract a signi cant user base, the environment must provide reliable and e cient application execution. The issues of correctness and performance are fundamental to this environment, yet many times these goals are in con ict. While maintaining correctness is not optional, optimal performance is di cult to always achieve. In order to detect and remedy performance issues, a range of analysis tools are needed. In this paper we describe three tools that are used to study the performance of the Compaq FX!32 binary translation system. We discuss these tools and illustrate how they are used to identify various performance or workload issues related to translation, emulation and optimization.

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