A Highly Efficient Full‐System Virtual Prototype Based on Virtualization‐Assisted Approach
Hsin‐I Wu1,a, Chi-Kang Chen 2, Tsung‐Ying Lu1,b and Ren‐Song Tsay1,c
1National Tsing Hua University, Department of Computer Science, Hsinchu, Taiwan
ahiwu.dery@gmail.com
biu0987810505@gmail.com
crstsay@gmail.com
2Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan
rc@itri.org.tw
ABSTRACT
An effective full‐system virtual prototype is critical for early‐stage systems design exploration. Generally, however, traditional acceleration approaches of virtual prototypes cannot accurately analyze system performance and model non‐deterministic inter‐component interactions due to the unpredictability of simulation progress. In this paper, we propose an effective virtualization‐assisted approach for modeling and performance analysis. First, we develop a deterministic synchronization process that manages the interactions affecting the data dependency in chronological order to model inter‐component interactions consistently. Second, we create accurate timing and bus contention models based on runtime operation statistics for analyzing system performance. We implement the proposed virtualization‐assisted approach on an off‐the‐shelf System‐on‐Chip (SoC) board to demonstrate the effectiveness of our idea. The experimental results show that the proposed approach runs 12∼77 times faster than a commercial virtual prototyping tool and performance estimation is only 3∼6% apart from real systems.
