An Instruction Set Simulator with GDB Support and its Full System Simulation Virtual Platform

• Main Authors: Shin-YingLee, 李信穎
• Other Authors: Chung-Ho Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32076667648073436281

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電腦與通信工程研究所 === 98 === When developing a system-on-a-chip (SoC) embedded system, how to develop the system software as well as co-verify the hardware and software before all hardware modules are available is usually a big challenge for engineers. In this thesis, we have implemented a virtual platform with an ARM-based instruction set simulator in SystemC. This virtual platform provides a functional and/or approximate-timed accurate full system simulation environment. By this SystemC virtual platform, SoC developers are able to co-simulate, co-verify, evaluate, and analyze the whole SoC system including hardware devices, OS kernel, device drivers, and application programs…etc., in a simple way. Also, we have provided a GDB RDP communication channel to connect the virtual platform and GDB debugger directly. Through this virtual platform and the naked GDB debugger which we modify from GDB, software engineers can easily develop and debug the system programs in the early development stage. Thus, the time-to-market of a new SoC design can be reduced significantly.