Precise software timing simulation considering execution contexts

Abstract

Context-sensitive software timing simulation enables a precise approximation of software timing at a high simulation speed. The number of cycles required to execute a sequence of instructions depends on the state of the microarchitecture prior to the execution of that sequence, which in turn heavily depends on the preceding instructions. This is exploited in context-sensitive timing simulation by selecting one of multiple pre-calculated cycle counts for an instruction sequence based on the control flow leading to a particular execution of the sequence. In this chapter, we give an overview of this concept and present our context-sensitive simulation framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables an accurate and fast timing simulation for software executing on current commercial embedded processors with complex high-performance microarchitectures without any slow, explicit modeling of components such as caches during simulation.