BTBench: A Benchmark for Comprehensive Binary Translation Performance Evaluation

Binary translation serves as a fundamental technol-ogy for instruction set emulation, system virtualization, runtime instrumentation, and numerous other applications. Many techniques have been proposed to enhance the efficiency of binary translation systems. However, imprecise performance evaluation leads to potential performance shortcomings of binary translators in real-world applications. Previous studies primarily employ CPU benchmarks, which may overlook performance issues spe-cific to binary translators and fail to guide for optimizing binary translation. To address this issue, we propose a new benchmark suite named BTBench(Binary Translation Benchmark), which provides a convenient, portable, and comprehensive solution. BT-Bench takes into account the inherent attributes of binary trans-lators, such as translation and code-cache lookup overhead. We carefully select benchmarks that offer comprehensive coverage and align with real-world application scenarios. To validate the effectiveness of BTBench, we conducted rigorous experimentation on four widely-used binary translators. The analysis of the results reveals that, compared to existing CPU benchmarks, BTBench is better suited for identifying potential performance shortcomings, providing invaluable insights for future optimization efforts. The BTBench benchmark suite is publicly available
¹
•