Enhancing Dynamic Binary Translation in Mobile Computing by Leveraging Polyhedral Optimization

Abstract

Dynamic binary translation (DBT) is gaining importance in mobile computing. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) augments mobile devices with powerful servers, whereas edge servers and smartphones are usually based on heterogeneous architecture. To leverage high-performance resources on servers, code offloading is an ideal approach that relies on DBT. In addition, mobile devices equipped with multicore processors and GPU are becoming ubiquitous. Migrating x86_64 application binaries to mobile devices by using DBT can also make a contribution to providing various mobile applications, e.g., multimedia applications. However, the translation efficiency and overall performance of DBT for application migration are not satisfactory, because of runtime overhead and low quality of the translated code. Meanwhile, traditional DBT systems do not fully exploit the computational resources provided by multicore processors, especially when translating sequential guest applications. In this work, we focus on leveraging ubiquitous multicore processors to improve DBT performance by parallelizing sequential applications during translation. For that, we propose LLPEMU, a DBT framework that combines binary translation with polyhedral optimization. We investigate the obstacles of adapting existing polyhedral optimization in compilers to DBT and present a feasible method to overcome these issues. In addition, LLPEMU adopts static-dynamic combination to ensure that sequential binaries are parallelized while incurring low runtime overhead. Our evaluation results show that LLPEMU outperforms QEMU significantly on the PolyBench benchmark.