Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4917

112 T.-C. Chiueh
Despite its robustness advantage, most real-world programs do not incorporate
array bounds checking, because its performance penalty is too high to be considered
practical. Whereas almost all previous research in this area focused on
static analysis techniques to reduce redundant bounds checks and thus minimize
the checking overhead, this work took a completely different approach that relies
on the debug register hardware feature available in most mainstream CPUs. By
leveraging debug registers’ address monitoring capability, Boud can accurately
detect array bound violations almost for free, i.e., without incurring any perarray-reference
overhead most of the time. We have successfully built a Boud
prototype based on the bound-checking GCC compiler under Red Hat Linux
7.2. The current Boud prototype can check bound violations for array references
both within and outside loops, although it applies debug register-based
bounds checking only to within-loop array references. Performance measurements
collected from running a set network applications on the Boud prototype
demonstrate that the throughput and latency penalty of Boud’s array bounds
checking mechanism is below 7.7% and 8.8%, respectively, when compared with
the vanilla GCC compiler, which does not perform any bounds checking. This
puts Boud as one of the fastest array bounds checking compilers ever reported
in the literature for C programs on the X86 architecture.
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