A Framework for Install - Time Optimization of Binary Dynamic - Link

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work described in this thesis has undergone many evolutions and owes many debts to many people. I w ould like to thank my advisor, Professor Wen-mei Hwu, for his teaching and advice and for giving me a chance to prove that I could get the job done. John Gyllenhaal was a source of much advice and a fountain of valuable information regarding the machine description language and the IMPACT schedule manager. Matthew Merten and I have been working side-by-side on this project for the past year and a half, and he has been a tremendous help in working through ideas, debugging my code, and doing anything else humanly possible to see that the project continued. Matt developed the instruction conversion to Mcode in the x86toM module and has done the work to incorporate object les into the framework. Mike Thiems helped to develop much o f t h e framework and worked extensively on the optimizations and binary code generation in the Lbx86 module. The decoding framework and PEwrite code were developed in the initial phase of the project with John Sias, Guanyao Cheng, and myself, and John was an excellent mentor. Thanks to all of the members of the IMPACT group and AMD's Advanced Architecture Labs for their technical guidance. Special thanks go to my family for all the years of support and encouragement.