We use binary modification to automatically transform applications so that they will perform speculative execution. We chose to use binary modification because it does not require source code and can be both language- and compiler-independent. Of course, the speculative execution transformations could also be performed within a compiler.
The SpecHint tool is implemented in 16,000 lines of C code. Currently, the tool is relatively unsophisticated. It is restricted to Digital UNIX 3.2 Alpha binaries produced by the native cc compiler that are single-threaded, statically linked, and retain their relocation information. It does not yet perform any loop optimizations, which could significantly decrease the number of copy-on-write checks in some codes. The tool does recognize, and remove from the shadow code, calls to a few of the standard library output routines (printf, fprintf and flsbuf) because these routines are known not to influence future read accesses and can require many cycles to execute.
As illustrated in Figure 2, the application object files and libraries are first linked with the SpecHint auxiliary object files and the necessary libraries to support threading. The resulting binary is transformed by SpecHint, then linked normally to produces a transformed application executable. The SpecHint object files, which were generated from 4,000 lines of assembly code, include the dynamic memory allocation routines used by the speculating thread and the routine that handles control transfers that cannot be statically resolved (discussed in Section 3.2.1), as well as a routine that the speculating thread executes in order to restart speculation (discussed in Section 3.2.2). They also contain versions of strncpy and memcpy for the shadow code that were hand-optimized to simulate the effect of performing loop optimizations to minimize copy-on-write checks in these standard library routines.
Figure 2: Transforming applications to use speculative
execution. The SpecHint object files contain various routines executed by the
original or speculating thread in order to support speculative execution.