High level Simulation

• Speaker(s): Frédéric Pétrot
• email: frederic.petrot@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
• web: https://tima.imag.fr/sls/people/petrot/

Downloads

• Slides
• Video recording

Abstract

Simulation at levels higher than RTL has been around for about 25 years now, and ad-hoc internally developed solutions, even though still quite in used, are gently being replaced by more opened, system level simulation environments. In this talk I will introduce system level simulation techniques, and give some details on two open-source digital system level environments: SoClib, a relatively confidential initiative targeting close to RTL descriptions, and QEMU, the very well known "processor emulator" (which is indeed a simulator).

Software

Disclaimer: Please note that I am not among the authors of these programs, and present them only because they are useful to my research and believe it could be useful to others.

SoClib

General information

• Repository: https://www.soclib.fr/svn/trunk/soclib
• Main documentation website: https://www.soclib.fr/
• Wikipedia page: None (yet!)
• Wiki page on wiki.f-si.org: None (yet!) either
• The software has been used in the following projects: SoClib, TSAR
• The software has been extensively used to teach classes at the hardware/software interface

Roadmap

• The software wishes to interface with the following tools: GHDL? GTKWave? QEMU?
• The project seeks help on:
  • general project architecture and cleanup
  • ISS support (through QEMU? or conversely)
  • Testing infrastructure
  • And ideas to speed-up simulation
    • Predecode in caches
    • Parallel simulation
    • ...
  • New platforms
  • New IPs

References

Papers by various authors of the SoClib environment

QEMU

General information

• Repository: https://git.qemu.org/git/qemu.git
• Main documentation website: https://www.qemu.org/
• Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
• The software has been used in the following projects: The Android Emulator, and too many to name, and many we are not aware of!
• The software has been extensively used to teach classes in assembler level programming and operating system design and implementation
  • for example (in French, sorry): Projet de conception de système d'exploitation

Roadmap

• On the hands on the QEMU community!
• But what could be useful to us:
  • instrumentation infrastructure (many proposals, none made it to mainline yet)
  • clean way to encapsulate a CPU

References

Fabrice Bellard. QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator. Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2005.