Lasagne: a static binary translator for weak memory model architectures

Rodrigo C.O. Rocha, Dennis Sprokholt, Martin Fink, Redha Gouicem, Tom Spink, Soham Chakraborty, Pramod Bhatotia

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
11 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The emergence of new architectures create a recurring challenge to ensure that existing programs still work on them. Manually porting legacy code is often impractical. Static binary translation (SBT) is a process where a program's binary is automatically translated from one architecture to another, while preserving their original semantics. However, these SBT tools have limited support to various advanced architectural features. Importantly, they are currently unable to translate concurrent binaries. The main challenge arises from the mismatches of the memory consistency model specified by the different architectures, especially when porting existing binaries to a weak memory model architecture. In this paper, we propose Lasagne, an end-to-end static binary translator with precise translation rules between x86 and Arm concurrency semantics. First, we propose a concurrency model for Lasagne's intermediate representation (IR) and formally proved mappings between the IR and the two architectures. The memory ordering is preserved by introducing fences in the translated code. Finally, we propose optimizations focused on raising the level of abstraction of memory address calculations and reducing the number of fences. Our evaluation shows that Lasagne reduces the number of fences by up to about 65%, with an average reduction of 45.5%, significantly reducing their runtime overhead.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPLDI 2022 - Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
EditorsRanjit Jhala, Isil Dillig
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages888-902
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450392655
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2022 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 13 Jun 202217 Jun 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)

Conference

Conference43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period13/06/2217/06/22

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Binary Translation
  • Compiler
  • Memory Model

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Lasagne: a static binary translator for weak memory model architectures'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this