A Heterogeneous Hardware-Software Co-Simulation Environment Using User Mode Linux and Clock Suppression

Abstract

Abstract-With the ever increasing complexity of electronic systems and the fact that networked embedded systems become more and more widespread, substantial research has already been devoted to such issues as hardware-software co-design and co-verification, virtual prototypes, and heterogeneous simulation environments including instruction set simulators.The work presented herein, however, presents a new and efficient heterogeneous hardware-software co-simulation environment for network or communication centric distributed embedded systems. It is new, since for the first time it integrates a complete operating system kernel and thus enables testing of driver software and protocol stacks. It is efficient, since it allows intelligently turning off unnecessary simulation loads to allow for the long simulation run times typically needed for communication protocol simulation.The correctness and validity of this virtual prototyping approach are shown by comparing simulation results with reallife measurements in a prototype system developed with the presented simulation environment.

A cosimulation methodology for HW/SW validation and performance estimation

“…One class of approaches borrows ideas from the theory of distributed synchronization, using the similarity between timed cosimulation and distributed event-driven simulation algorithms [Yoo and Choi 1997;Sung and Ha 1998;Kim et al 2002;Yi et al 2003;Muhr et al 2006]. All these approaches follow an asynchronous paradigm, in which each simulator manages its local time, and the local times evolve at different speeds.…”

“…Another solution relies on a proper alignment between the local clocks and a global clock, when rollback is not possible. In this way, the synchronization occurs only when events are exchanged [Sung and Ha 1998;Kim et al 2002;Yi et al 2003;Muhr et al 2006].…”