Migrating Software from x86 to ARM Architecture: An Instruction Prediction Approach

Abstract

For decades, the x86 architecture supported by Intel and AMD has been the dominate target for software development. Recently, ARM has solidified itself as a highly competitive and promising CPU architecture by exhibiting both high performance and low power consumption simultaneously. In the foreseeable future, a copious amount of software will be fully migrated to the ARM architecture or support both x86 and ARM simultaneously. Nevertheless, software ports from x86 to ARM are not trivial for a number of reasons. First, it is time consuming to write code that resolves all compatibility issues for a new architecture. Second, specific hardware (e.g. ARM chips) and supporting toolkits (e.g. libraries and compilers) may not be readily available for developers, which will delay the porting process. Third, it is hard to predict the performance of software before testing it on production chips. In this paper, we strive to tackle these challenges by proposing an instruction prediction method that can automatically generate AARCH64 code from existing x86-64 executables. Although the generated code might not be directly executable, it provides a cheap and efficient solution for developers to estimate certain runtime metrics before actually building, deploying and testing code on an ARM-based CPU. Our experimental results show that AARCH64 instructions derived using prediction can achieve a high Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) Score. This indicates a quality match between generated executables and natively ported AARCH64 software.