Enhanced heterogeneous code cache management scheme for dynamic binary translation

Recently, Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) technology has gained much attentions on embedded systems due to its various capabilities. However, the memory resource in embedded systems is often limited. This leads to the overhead of code re-translation and causes significant performance degradation. To reduce this overhead, Heterogeneous Code Cache (HCC), is proposed to split the code cache among SPM and main memory to avoid code re-translation. Although HCC is effective in handling applications with large working sets, it ignores the execution frequencies of program segments. Frequently executed program segments can be stored in main memory and suffer from large access latency. This causes significant performance loss. To address this problem, an enhanced Heterogeneous Code Cache management scheme which considers program behaviors is proposed in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed management scheme can effectively improve the access ratio of SPM from 49.48% to 95.06%. This leads to 42.68% improvement of performance as compared with the management scheme proposed in the previous work.