PerfDBT: Efficient Performance Regression Testing of Dynamic Binary Translation

Dynamic binary translation (DBT) has been adopted in many important applications. Due to the large scale and complexity of a DBT system, a minor code change may lead to unexpected impact on the performance. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct performance regression testing for DBT systems. However, existing benchmark suites are not suitable for daily performance testing due to the extremely-long testing time. To address this challenge, we propose PerffiBT, which employs a novel approach to automatically generate test programs from existing long-running benchmarks. The execution times of the generated test programs are much shorter, which allows them to be used for daily performance regression testing of a DBT system. Experimental results demonstrate that the test programs generated by PerfDBT can achieve an average of 71X testing efficiency compared to original benchmarks. Furthermore, it can also deliver similar testing results to original benchmarks.