High-Performance ARM-on-ARM Virtualization for Multicore SystemC-TLM-Based Virtual Platforms
arXiv:2505.12987 · doi:10.23919/DATE64628.2025.10993216
Abstract
The increasing complexity of hardware and software requires advanced development and test methodologies for modern systems on chips. This paper presents a novel approach to ARM-on-ARM virtualization within SystemC-based simulators using Linux's KVM to achieve high-performance simulation. By running target software natively on ARM-based hosts with hardware-based virtualization extensions, our method eliminates the need for instruction-set simulators, which significantly improves performance. We present a multicore SystemC-TLM-based CPU model that can be used as a drop-in replacement for an instruction-set simulator. It places no special requirements on the host system, making it compatible with various environments. Benchmark results show that our ARM-on-ARM-based virtual platform achieves up to 10 x speedup over traditional instruction-set-simulator-based models on compute-intensive workloads. Depending on the benchmark, speedups increase to more than 100 x.
PREPRINT - accepted by the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference 2025 (DATE '25)