The Ballistic JIT Engine

„The world's fastest ARM recompiler“

Overview

This is a rewrite of the dynarmic recompiler, with the goal of fixing its many flaws.

Immediate Goals

• Create Tier 1 backend compiler.
• Create Tier 2 backend compiler.
• Support MOVZ, MOVK, MOVN instructions on both compilers.
• Add more peephole optimizations.
• Have 100% branch coverage.
• Have a config to change Ballistic behavior at runtime.
• Support Block linking.
• Map ARM flags to x86 flags.
• Support 128-bit types and x86 SSE/AVX instructions.
• Add exception handling and recover guest CPU state.
• Add register spilling.
• Add Callback Memory Model.
• Add TLB Memory model.

Building Ballistic

Install Dependencies

macOS

brew install cmake python3 llvm

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake python3 libclang-dev llvm-dev

Fedora

sudo dnf install cmake python3 gcc-c++ clang-devel llvm-devel

Configure CMake

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

macOS (If LLVM is not found)

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix llvm) ..

Build Binaries

cmake --build .

The following executables will be created in the build/ directory:

• libBallistic.a (Static Library)
• ballistic_cli (Used for Ballistic development)
• decoder_cli (Instruction decoding tool)
• cdoc (Documentation generator)
• test_* (Test suite, run with ctest)

See tools/ for more information on these executables.