PCSim: A Multithreaded Full-System Simulator for Embedded Software Development
There have been strong demands for a fast full-system simulation platform targeted multicore embedded systems to facilitate software developing and debugging. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a fast multithreaded full-system simulator called PCSim as a first step towards such a simulation platform. PCSim models a dual-core PowerPC platform named HPCN-MPC8641D produced by FreeScale with two PowerPC E600 cores and plenty of peripherals. It also models exceptions and interrupts to support whole-system applications including OS. It is based on an interpretive simulation technology to provide flexibility and meanwhile implemented as a multithreaded program to accelerate multicore simulation. It provides three simulation modes: 1) the application mode in which target binary programs run directly on the simulator without any guest OS supports;2) the full-system mode in which full-system applications including OS are simulated;3) the CUDAlike mode in which the simulator acts just like the NVIDIA CUDA Device, Currently, PCSim supports several peripherals included in the target platform, and can run a tailored Linux OS with an average execution rate of more than 10.5 MIPS. We instantiate as many as 128 virtual cores to carry out a matrix multiplication computation in the CUDA-like mode and prove it works.
simulation full-system simulation PowerPC multithreaded functional simulation embedded system software developing
Fan Ni Xiaopeng Gao Xiang Long
State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment School of Computer Science and Technology, BUAA Beijing, China
国际会议
2010 International Conference on Future Information Technology(2010年未来信息技术国际会议 ICFIT 2010)
长沙
英文
28-34
2010-12-14（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）