Constructing portable compiled instruction-set simulators: an ADL-driven approach, in "DATE ’06

Instruction set simulators are common tools used for the development of new architectures and embed-ded software among countless other functions. This pa-per presents a framework that quickly generates fast and exible instruction-set simulators from a speci-cation based on a C-like architecture-description lan-guage. The framework provides a consistent platform for constructing and evaluating different classes of simula-tors, including interpreters, static-compiled simulators, and dynamic-compiled simulators. The framework also fea-tures a new construction method for dynamic-compiled simulator that involves no low-level programming. It pro-les and translates frequently executed regions of sim-ulated binary to C++ code and invokes GCC to com-pile such code into dynamically loaded libraries, which are then loaded into the simulator at run time to ac-celerate simulation. Our experimental results based on the MIPS architecture and the SPEC CPU2000 bench-marks show that our dynamic-compiled simulator is capa-ble of achieving up to 11 times speedup compared to our fast interpreter. Compared to other dynamic-compiled sim-ulators requiring signicant system programming expertise to construct, the proposed approach is simpler to imple-ment and more portable. 1