On the interface between QEMU and SystemC for hardware modeling

In this paper, we present an interface for connecting the master/slave ports of hardware modeled in SystemC to a QEMU and SystemC based virtual platform. The virtual platform uses QEMU as the instruction-accurate instruction set simulator (IA-ISS) and is capable of running a full-fledged operating system such as Linux. The proposed interface enables the hardware modeled in SystemC to access hardware modeled in QEMU; thus, it can be used to facilitate the co-design of diverse hardware models and device drivers at the early stage of Electronic System Level (ESL) design flow. Our experimental results—of using Direct Memory Access Controller (DMAC) with two master ports and one slave port as an example—show that the proposed interface makes it possible for migrating hardware models from QEMU to SystemC and for cross verifying the hardware models and device drivers. Moreover, the virtual platform is capable of providing instruction-accurate statistics, thus making it easy for evaluating the performance of the hardware models and for design space exploration.