The Implementation of Dynamic Linking in Dynamic Binary Translation Systems

Dynamic binary translation (DBT) is a commonly used technology in virtual machines. Most DBT systems, like Dynamo, can only translate programs statically linked but not ones dynamically linked. Statically linked programs will lead to expansion of binary codes, which is the indirect reason of loss on performance. In this paper, we propose an approach to implement dynamic linking on DBT systems. During the research, we came across some challenges related with operating systems, compilation and architecture, which will be discussed later in detail. And we have developed a module and had it tested on our DBT system, CrossBit. The statistics show that CrossBit with dynamic linking reduces the number of translated blocks and execution time.