A synchronization profiler for hybrid full system simulation platform

Abstract

A hybrid abstraction of a full system simulation platform can provide flexible hardware-and-software co-verification and co-simulation in early stage of system-on-a-chip development. Being a hybrid abstraction for the simulated system, it has the advantage of faster simulation speed; however, its lack of timing information and no performance-metric synchronization mechanism among the different abstraction levels of the simulation models present troubles in doing performance analysis. To facilitate performance evaluations for hybrid abstraction simulation systems, in this paper, we propose a synchronization profiler to enable cross-abstraction level performance analysis and at the same time retain the fast simulation advantage. This approach allows a design engineer to evaluate not only the interactions between an application and its accelerated hardware but also the corresponding device drivers as well as the OS kernel.