HQEMU: A Multi-Threaded and Retargetable Dynamic Binary Translator on Multicores

Dynamic binary translation (DBT) is a core technology to many important applications such as system virtualization, dynamic binary instrumentation and security. However, there are several factors that often impede its performance: (1) emulation overhead before translation; (2) translation and optimization overhead, and (3) translated code quality. On the dynamic binary translator itself, the issues also include its retargetability to support guest applications from dif-ferent instruction-set architectures (ISAs) to host machines also with different ISAs, an important feature for system virtualization. In this work, we take advantage of the ubiq-uitous multicore platforms, using multithreaded approach to implement DBT. By running the translators and the dy-namic binary optimizers on different threads on differen