Effective exploitation of SIMD resources in cross-ISA virtualization

Abstract

System virtualization is a fundamental technology that enables many important applications. However, existing virtualization techniques suffer from a critical limitation due to their limited exploitation of host SIMD hardware resources, especially when a guest application does not have inherently fine-grained data-level parallelism. To bridge this utilization gap and unleash the full potential of host SIMD resources, this paper proposes an effective and unconventional SIMD exploitation technique. The proposed exploitation takes advantage of ample host SIMD registers and powerful host SIMD instructions to generate more efficient host binary code for guest applications even without any fine-grained data-level parallelism. It also mitigates the shortage of general-purpose registers on the host platform, as well as improves the efficiency of accessing guest registers. We have implemented the exploitation in an extensively-used virtualization platform, QEMU. Experimental results on a comprehensive list of benchmarks from PARSEC, SPEC-CPU2017, and Google Octane JavaScript benchmark suite show that an average of 2.2X performance speedup can be achieved for AArch64 binaries on an x86-64 host machine. We believe the proposed technique will provide a new perspective for our community to rethink the exploitation of SIMD hardware resources.