High-Performance ARM-on-ARM Virtualization for Multicore SystemC-TLM-Based Virtual Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-performance ARM virtualization approach within SystemC simulators using Linux's KVM, significantly accelerating simulation speed by eliminating instruction-set simulators.

Contribution

It presents a novel ARM-on-ARM virtualization method leveraging Linux KVM for high-performance, multicore SystemC-TLM virtual platforms without special host requirements.

Findings

Achieves up to 10x speedup over traditional simulators

Speedups exceed 100x on certain workloads

Compatible with various host environments

Abstract

The increasing complexity of hardware and software requires advanced development and test methodologies for modern systems on chips. This paper presents a novel approach to ARM-on-ARM virtualization within SystemC-based simulators using Linux's KVM to achieve high-performance simulation. By running target software natively on ARM-based hosts with hardware-based virtualization extensions, our method eliminates the need for instruction-set simulators, which significantly improves performance. We present a multicore SystemC-TLM-based CPU model that can be used as a drop-in replacement for an instruction-set simulator. It places no special requirements on the host system, making it compatible with various environments. Benchmark results show that our ARM-on-ARM-based virtual platform achieves up to 10 x speedup over traditional instruction-set-simulator-based models on compute-intensive workloads. Depending on the benchmark, speedups increase to more than 100 x.