Ultra fast cycleaccurate compiled emulation of inorder pipelined architectures

Emulation of one architecture on another is useful when the architecture is under design, when software must be ported to a new platform or is being developed for systems which are still under development, or for embedded systems that have insufficient resources to support the software development process. Emulation using an interpreter is typically slower than normal execution by up to 3 orders of magnitude. Our approach instead translates the program from the original architecture to another architecture while faithfully preserving its semantics at the lowest level. The emulation speeds are comparable to, and often faster than, programs running on the original architecture. Partial evaluation of architectural features is used to achieve such impressive performance, while permitting accurate statistics collection. Accuracy is at the level of the number of clock cycles spent executing each instruction (hence the description cycle-accurate). Key words: instruction set emulator, interpreter, compiled emulation, pipelined VLIW architectur

Instrumentation Tools

Execution) is a tracing system developed by Larus and Ball which is incorporated as part of the Gnu C compiler [3]. Its goal is to generate very small traces which can be saved and then reused for multiple simulation runs. The modified compiler actually produces two executable programs. The first is the modified application. In addition to normal compilation, the compiler uses the notion of abstract execution to insert tracing code in the application code. Abstract execution is based upon control-flow tracing to reduce the amount of trace code necessary. The resulting trace produced by the modified application is only a tiny part of the full trace. This allows traces representing long execution runs to be saved on disk. The compiler also produces an application specific trace regeneration program. The regeneration program is a post-processing tool which accepts the compacted trace and outputs the full execution trace. The tracing overhead, including the cost of saving the compacted tra..