Thread-Shared Software Code Caches

Software code caches are increasingly being used to amortize the runtime overhead of dynamic optimizers, simulators, emulators, dynamic translators, dynamic compilers, and other tools. Despite the now-widespread use of code caches, techniques for efficiently sharing them across multiple threads have not been fully explored. Some systems simply do not support threads, while others resort to thread-private code caches. Although thread-private caches are much simpler to manage, synchronize, and provide scratch space for, they simply do not scale when applied to many-threaded programs. Thread-shared code caches are needed to target server applications, which employ hundreds of worker threads all performing similar tasks. Yet, those systems that do share their code caches often have bruteforce, inefficient solutions to the challenges of concurrent code cache access: a single global lock on runtime system code and suspension of all threads for any cache management action. This limits the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Derek Bruening, Vladimir Kiriansky, Timothy Garnett, Sanjeev Banerji
• Keywords: CGO 2006, Code Caches, Software Code Caches, Software Engineering, Thread-shared Code Caches