Design And Implementation Of PowerPC Simulation System Based On Paravirtualized Memory

As the application area in embedded system expands rapidly nowadays, the virtualization technology develops much faster than ever. PowerPC architecture have excellent performance and a wide range of applications in embedded field, but unlike the PC-based X86 system, the system cost based on PowerPC architecture is much higher. Therefore, the research and development of a high-performance simulation development platform for PowerPC architecture is urgent.The full system simulation for PowerPC is to simulate all the functional components of a computer system, including CPU(Instruction Set Architecture, Interrupts and Exception), I/O device(Serial Ports, Net Card and LCD) and memory system(MMU). The operating system can run on the virtual machine without any modifications.The simulation of MMU plays a very important part in the whole system simulation. The speed of virtual address translation can increase a lot after the address translation cache is added to the MMU address translation process due to the omittance of the unnecessary address calculation..The operation of accessing page tables, especially the master page table in Linux kernel is a very frequent process. Therefore exploring the common characteristics between the PowerPC architecture and the PPC-Linux kernel can profoundly make the simulation process more efficient.The novel mechanism based on paravirtualizition technology let the virtual machine itself manage the access to the Linux master page table. The access is intercepted and buffered, so the performance of the whole system is improved dramatically due to localization principle and the avoidance of MMU address translation.