DynamoSim: a trace-based dynamically compiled instruction set simulator

ABSTRACT

Instruction set simulators are indispensable tools for the architectural exploration and verification of embedded systems. Different techniques have recently been proposed to speed up the simulation over the classical interpretation-based simulators, while maintaining their flexibility. We introduce a suite of techniques inspired by recent advances in dynamic compilers to construct a hybrid simulation framework. Compared with compiled simulators reported earlier, our framework is more flexible, since any instruction can be interpreted; and faster, since only frequently executed instructions are translated on-the-fly into native code for direct execution, and the scope of our translation is extended from basic blocks to traces, and sophisticated register allocation is performed. Comprehensive results on SPEC2000 benchmarks are reported for the standard SimpleScalar processor to demonstrate the efficiency of proposed techniques.

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