Evaluation of dynamic binary translation techniques for full system virtualisation on ARMv7-A

• We present the first open source hypervisor for ARMv7-A with full virtualisation using DBT.
• We propose several system-level dynamic binary translation techniques for ARMv7-A.
• We evaluate our techniques on real hardware and obtain acceptable overhead numbers.

We present the STAR hypervisor, the first open source software-only hypervisor for the ARMv7-A architecture that offers full system virtualisation using dynamic binary translation (DBT). We analyse techniques for user-space DBT on ARM and propose several solutions to adapt them to full system virtualisation. We evaluate the performance of a naive configuration of our hypervisor on a real embedded hardware platform and propose techniques to reduce DBT-based overhead. We analyse the impact of our optimisations using both micro-benchmarks and real applications. While the naive version of our hypervisor can get several times slower than native, our optimisations bring down the run-time overhead of real applications to at most 16%.