Binary Translation

The source architected register values are stored in a register conetxt block held in memory. If feasible, source register can map directly to target register for performance optimization. Static binary translation is not always possible because of the following code discovery problems:

(1) indirect jump of which the target is unknown at translation time
(2) padding bytes or data inserted by compiler to align instruction makes it difficult to determine where the next instruction starts after the last one. This is especially hard for ISA with variable instruction length

Another type of problem is code-location. In an indirect jump of which the destination address in the register is a source code address. The address must be mapped to a address int the translated code.