CrossMapping: Harmonizing Memory Consistency in Cross-ISA Binary Translation

The increasing prevalence of new Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) necessitates the migration of closed-source binary programs across ISAs. Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) stands out as a crucial technology for the cross-ISA emulation of binary programs. However, due to the mismatch in memory consistency between guest ISA and host ISA, DBT systems face substantial challenges in guaranteeing correctness and translation performance for concurrent programs. Despite several attempts to bridge the memory inconsistency between guest and host ISA, prior work is either not universal for cross-ISA DBT systems or inefficient and even error-prone in translation.

This work presents CrossMapping, a general primitive mapping framework to enhance existing DBT systems for cross-ISA translation. By harmonizing memory consistency across diverse ISAs, CrossMapping enables smooth cross-ISA translation and accomplishes correct emulation. CrossMapping introduces specification tables to describe memory models in a unified and precise format, which facilitates the derivation of concurrent primitive mapping schemes based on a convenient comparison and analysis of memory models. The correctness of cross-ISA emulation is guaranteed by harmoniously integrating the derived mapping schemes with existing DBT systems. We evaluate CrossMapping for x86, ARMv8, and RISC-V on top of QEMU using the PARSEC benchmark suite. The results show that the average performance improvement can reach 8.5% when emulating x86 on ARMv8 and 7.3% when emulating x86 on RISC-V.