Uniform debugging interface for simulators

Abstract

A virtual prototype (VP) is an abstract behavioral model of a SoC (system on chip) which is both registers and bit accurate and provides full system memory map. This prototype thus provides a simulation environment for early-embedded software development and verification as the hardware availability is usually late in the development cycle. Software developers use VP to builds the application, which also needs to be debugged. For debugging the software during their development, they use various commercial and non-commercial debuggers like Trace32, Keil, and GDB etc. These debuggers communicate with a VP using some debug support interface protocol viz MCD (Multi-Core Debug), AGDI etc. However, not every VP can support multiple debug interface and it was preferred to support one common interface, thus requiring debugging protocol conversion adaptors to connect with different debuggers. The work intends to provide a virtual prototype that will interface GNU debugger with MCD.