Reducing Compilation Time Overhead in Compiled Simulators

Compiled simulation is a well known technique for improving the performance of instruction set simulators at the cost of compilation time. However the compilation time overhead makes such usage of compiler optimizations impractical especially for large applications. In this paper, we propose a hybrid compiled simulation approach that is simple, generates an optimized decoder and has almost no compilation overhead comparing to static compiled simulation. Using two contemporary processor models-ARM7 and Sparc-we demonstrated that our technique can reduce the compilation time by 99% on the average, from several thousands of seconds to only tens of seconds.