Re: [Qemu-devel] QEmu as a Device Software Optimization tool

[Thiemo Seufer <ths@networkno.de>]

Paul Borman wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have been working with QEmu for a few months now at Wind River.  I am 
> sure many of you already know Jason Wessel and Alex deVries who championed 
> QEmu as a tool for our Linux product.  It is my goal to demonstrate the 
> power of QEmu for embedded software development (excuse me, DSO - Device 
> Software Optimization).  I have identified several areas in which some work 
> needs to be done to make QEmu more appropriate for embedded development.  I 
> am interested in comments or pointers to existing work for several areas (I 
> have also done work in many of these areas already).  I have been working 
> mainly with PowerPC targets and X86 Linux as a host.
>
> System Clock - Currently it appears to me that QEmu attempt to sync the 
> "system clock" with realtime resulting in a different number of emulated 
> "clock" cycles per clock interrupt.  In the embedded environment we are 
> typically much more interested in a deterministic result from the clock.  
> For the PowerPC I have implemented an alternate implementation of the TB 
> and Decrementer that increments the time base based on the number of 
> emulated instructions that have been processed.  It is not perfect, but at 
> least now the timer interrupt is triggered when the decrementer goes 
> negative.  Have others worked on this problem?

I think this goes in the more general area of instruction/cycle counting,
which would be also useful for basic performance analysis. IMHO the
alternatives should be switchable at runtime (from the monitor and via
command line), with host clock synchronization staying the default.

So far I haven't thought much about the other topics you raise.


Thiemo