Tag: SimOS

Carbon “Swap ‘n’ Play” – A New Implementation of an Old Idea

Carbon Design Systems have been quite busy lately with a flurry of blog posts about various aspects of virtual prototype technology. Mostly good stuff, and I tend to agree with their push that a good approach is to mix fast timing-simplified models with RTL-derived cycle-accurate models. There are exceptions to this, in particular exploratoty architecture and design where AT-style models are needed. Recently, they posted about their new Swap ‘n’ Play technology, which is a old proven idea that has now been reimplemented using ARM fast simulators and Carbon-generated ARM processor models.

Continue reading “Carbon “Swap ‘n’ Play” – A New Implementation of an Old Idea”

CoWare SystemC Checkpointing

gearsContinuing on my series of posts about checkpointing in virtual platforms (see previous posts Simics, Cadence, our FDL paper), I have finally found a decent description of how CoWare does things for SystemC. It is pretty much the same approach as that taken by Cadence, in that it uses full stores a complete process state to disk, and uses special callbacks to handle the connection to open files and similar local resources on a system. The approach is described in a paper called  “A Checkpoint/Restore Framework for SystemC-Based Virtual Platforms”, by Stefan Kraemer and Reiner Leupers of RWTH Aachen, and Dietmar Petras, and Thomas Philipp of CoWare, published at the International Symposium on System-on-Chip, in Tampere, Finland, in October of 2009.

Continue reading “CoWare SystemC Checkpointing”