High-level platform modeling and exploration

One advantage of using a virtual platform over real hardware for embedded software development and testing is the ability of some simulators to take checkpoints of their state. If the entire system model is detailed enough, it might take several minutes (or hours) to simulate booting the O.S. If a snapshot of the simulation is saved just after it has finished booting, each time it is necessary to run the embedded software, designers can simply restore the snapshot and go. Restarting a checkpoint typically takes a few seconds. In this book we present our work on adding a description level language as SystemC to two Virtual Platforms. This work was done for a commercial Virtual Platform, and later translated to a open-sourced Platform. This book also presents a set of modifications to SystemC language to support checkpointing. These modifications will make it possible to take the state of a SystemC running simulation and save it to disk. Later, the same simulation can be restored to the same point it was before, without any change to the simulated modules. These changes would help SystemC to be suitable for use by Virtual Platforms as a description language.