Mable: A Technique for Efficient Machine Simulation

We present a framework for an efficient instruction-level machine simulator which can be used with existing software tools to develop and analyze programs for a proposed processor architecture. The simulator exploits similarities between the instruction sets of the emulated machine and the host machine to provide fast simulation. Furthermore, existing program development tools on the host machine such as debuggers and profilers can be used without modification on the emulated program running under the simulator. The simulator can therefore be used to debug and tune application code for the new processor without building a whole new set of program development tools. The technique has applicability to a diverse set of simulation problems. We show how the framework has been used to build simulators for a shared-memory multiprocessor, a superscalar processor with support for speculative execution, and a dual-issue embedded processor.