QEMU indirect branch handling optimization (Shadow Stack and IBTC)

The source codes are in qemu_virtual_machine.tar.bz2.

You need to install zlib1g-dev first. Otherwise you may get error zlib check failed.

$ sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

Extract the source codes and build QEMU:

$ make init

This will create two directories qemu-0.13.0 (contains the source codes extracted) and build.qemu (contains the built QEMU binaries).

Put your modified codes in directory source and use

$ make build

to copy your modified codes to qemu-0.13.0 and build QEMU again.

My source codes implements two optimizations: shadow stack and indirect branch target cache(IBTC). File optimization.c has two flags indicating whether to use these two optimizations.

I used MiBench-automotive and CoreMark to measure the correctness and effectiveness of my implementation. Due to the license issue, I didn't upload CoreMark's source codes. However, it is free to download from the website after registration.

Extrack Mibench:

$ make benchmark

Run benchmarks:

$ ./run-mibench.sh 
$ ./run-coremark.sh

Make sure to put the extracted Coremark source codes in directory benchmark/coremark_v1.0.

$ make clean

The implementation details can be found at report/vm_hw1.pdf.