Dalvik bytecode acceleration using Fetch/Decode Hardware Extension with hybrid Execution

The significant disadvantage of Android Operating System is Dalvik bytecode interpretation using Dalvik Virtual Machine (VM) [1], [2]. However there are many techniques [3] to improve the performance of VM. In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology which is "Fetch/Decode Hardware Extension with hybrid Execution". It is a particular hardware that specially designed to fetch and decode Dalvik bytecode directly. In the hybrid execution stage complex bytecodes will be emulated by optimized Dalvik bytecode handler software of the native processor but simple bytecodes will be executed on hardware of the native processor directly. The outstanding success key of our technique is the Dalvik handler software optimization which utilized the extended hardware to reduce the operation steps in the original handler software. The experimental results show the speed up improvements on the individual simple bytecodes, the individual complex bytecodes, the test Java program of simple bytecodes and complex bytecodes can be achieved up to 22×, 3×, 10.44× and 2.12× respectively.