SimICS/sun4m: A virtual workstation

System level simulators allow computer architects and system software designers to recreate an accurate and complete replica of the program behavior of a target system, regardless of the availability, existence, or in-strumentation support of such a system. Applications include evaluation of architectural design alternatives as well as software engineering tasks such as traditional debugging and performance tuning. We present an implementation of a simulator acting as a virtual workstation fully compatible with the sun4m architecture from Sun Microsystems. Built using the system-level SPARC V8 simulator SimICS, SimICS/sun4m models one or more SPARC V8 proces-sors, supports user-developed modules for data cach