A PCI virtualization mechanism for AMBA devices in Microsoft Windows

PKUnity-86 is a system-on-chip that integrates AMBA system bus architecture with a x86 processor. A tremendous amount of standard intellectual properties from embedded world can be leveraged, as well as Microsoft Windows and x86 applications. How to identify and access AMBA devices is principal for Microsoft Windows compatibility. The paper implements a centralized PCI virtualization mechanism called VPCI, which routes configuration memory and I/O transactions to make Microsoft Window identify PCI devices on PCI bus and AMBA devices on AMBA. Standard Windows PCI device drivers can be reused directly. In Bochs simulator PKUnity-86 system-on-chip that adapts this VPCI mechanism boots up Microsoft Windows 98 and Window XP, and run typical x86 applications. The VPCI achieves better performance than standard PCI with only 13.7% hardware cost. The performance of read and write configuration space is 7.31 and 6.73 times that of AMD VSA.EI051013-10193