AOBO: An AArch64 Online Binary Optimizer

Ocolos is the first online code layout optimization system on the Intel64 platform for unmodified applications. Building upon the OCOLOS framework, we develop the AOBO by redesigning crucial modules to support AArch64 instruction set architecture.

Prerequisites

Please refer instructions from links or directly run commands listed below to install prerequisites:

• Linux Perf:sudo apt-get install linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic
• libunwind: https://github.com/libunwind/libunwind (1.7+ version)
• Rust: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
• boost_1_73_0 (for MySQL): https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_73_0.html
• binutils (for objdump) ¹ : https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/
• boost: sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

Download AOBO for mysql

> git clone [email protected]:onroadmuwl/ocolos-public-aarch64.git

Install BOLT

To use llvm-bolt and perf2bolt utilities, BOLT needs to be installed.
Please follow the commands below to install BOLT

> mkdir BOLT && cd BOLT
> git clone [email protected]:onroadmuwl/llvm-project-bolt.git llvm-bolt
> cd llvm-bolt
> cd ..
> mkdir build && cd build
> cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" ../llvm-bolt/llvm -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="X86;AArch64" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS=ON -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;lld;bolt"
> make -j

Build MySQL from source

> git clone https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server.git 
> cd mysql-server 
> git checkout 6846e6b2f72931991cc9fd589dc9946ea2ab58c9 

In CMakeList.txt, at line 580, please add ²:

STRING_APPEND(CMAKE_C_FLAGS  " -fno-jump-tables")
STRING_APPEND(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS " -fno-jump-tables")
STRING_APPEND(CMAKE_C_FLAGS " -no-pie")
STRING_APPEND(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS " -no-pie")

Also, in CMakeList.txt, turn off ld.gold linker:
change OPTION(USE_LD_GOLD "Use GNU gold linker" ON) to be OPTION(USE_LD_GOLD "Use GNU gold linker" OFF)

Then build mysqld from source:

> export CC=gcc 
> export CXX=g++
> mkdir build && cd build 
> cmake .. -DWITH_BOOST={path of the boost_1_73_0 directory} -DCMAKE_CXX_LINK_FLAGS=-Wl,--emit-relocs -DCMAKE_C_LINK_FLAGS=-Wl,--emit-relocs -DBUILD_CONFIG=mysql_release 
> make -j
> make install

To initialize MySQL, run:

> chown -R {user} {path to MySQL directory}
> {path to MySQL directory}/bin/mysqld --initialize-insecure --user=root --datadir={your data dir path of MySQL} 
> {path to MySQL directory}/bin/mysqld --user=root --port=3306 --datadir={your data dir path of MySQL}

In another terminal, run:

> mysql -u root
> CREATE USER 'aobo'@'localhost';
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'aobo'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
> CREATE DATABASE aobo_db;
> QUIT;
> mysqladmin -u root shutdown

Note:

1. {path to MySQL directory} is normally /usr/local/mysql unless otherwise specified during MySQL server's installation.
2. {user} should be your linux user name.

Build Sysbench

> sudo apt-get update 
> sudo apt-get install sysbench

Or if you prefer to build sysbench from source, please refer instructions in the following webpage:
https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench

Build & run AOBO

• Navigate to ocolos-public-aarch64 directory.
• In the file config, specify the absolute path for nm,perf,objdump,llvm-bolt,perf2bolt ³
• In config, please also specify the commands to run MySQL server and sysbench. The example commands are given in the config file.
  • Note: the first argument of the command (a.k.a. the binary being invoked in the command) should be written in its full path.
• Please also remember to export the path of ocolos-public-aarch64's directory.

> export OCOLOS_PATH=/your/path/to/ocolos-public-aarch64

• Then run the following commands:

> make
> ./extract_call_sites
> ./tracer

• make will produce 2 executables (tracer & extract_call_sites)+ 1 shared library (replace_function.so).
  • If libunwind library is stored in other places instead of /usr/local/lib, you also need to edit Makefile and update it to the corresponding path.
  • If libunwind's header files are stored in other places instead of /usr/local/include, you also need to edit Makefile and update it to the corresponding path.
• ./extract_call_sites will produce 2 files which store all call sites information extracted from the target binary (a.k.a. mysqld) to the tmp_data_dir you specified in the config file.
• ./tracer will invoke both MySQL server process and sysbench workloads oltp_read_only, and then perform code layout optimization during runtime.
  • The output of sysbench's throughput can be found in sysbench_output.txt. At about the 130th second, you will see a significant throughput improvement, since AOBO has replace the code layout to be the optimized one at that time.
  • After one run (~3 minutes), if you want to start another run, please first run mysqladmin -u root shutdown command to shutdown the current MySQL server process.

Miscellaneous (notes about how to debug AOBO)

In Makefile's CXXFLAGS,

• if -DAArch64 flag is added, AOBO will support the AArch64 platform;
• if -DIntel64 flag is added, AOBO will support the Intel64 platform;
• if -DTIME_MEASUREMENT flag is added, AOBO will print the execution time of code replacement;
• if -DMEASUREMENT flag is added, AOBO will print metrics such as:
  • the number of functions on the call stack when target process is paused,
  • the number of functions that are moved by BOLT,
  • the number of functions that are in the BOLT and original functions.
• if -DDEBUG_INFO flag is added, AOBO will print debug information such as:
  • the information about detailed behavior of tracer
  • the content in the call stack when the target process is paused
  • -DDEBUG_INFO can also be defined in src/replace_function.hpp. In this way, the ld_preload library will store all machine code per function it inserted to the target process as a uint8_t format array into a file. The file can be found in the tmp_data_path you defined in the config file.
• if -DDEBUG flag is added, after code replacement, AOBO will first send SIGSTOP signal to target process and then resume the target process by PTRACE_DETACH. In this way, it allows debugging tools such as GDB to attach to the target process and observe what goes wrong after code replacement.

If the code replacement runs into a failure, you may want to do the following things to fix this problem

• first add the -DDEBUG_INFO to CXXFLAGS in Makefile and compile again.
• then run ./tracer
• after tracer run into an error, you can check {tmp_data_dir}/machine_code.txt's last few lines

Footnotes

1. If your objdump version is older than 2.27, please download the latest version of binutils. ↩

2. If the mysqld binary compiled by gcc generates callq instructions rather than call instructions, please refer to the solution discussed in this page. ↩

3. if nm,objdump and perf are already in shell, it's OK that their paths are not specified in config. This can be checked by which nm, which objdump and which perf. ↩