Target Emulation Integration And Cache Policy Of Instruction Emulation

The development of embedded systems and applications puts forward new requirements to embedded development environment and tools. Emulation tools of embedded development environment provide powerful support to embedded application development. With these tools, developers have less dependency on development boards, so they can cooperate better.There are two key points in integrating emulator into embedded development environment. One is the synchronized status between the development environment and the emulator. The other is the communication mechanism between them. Because they are two independent objects in the system, the synchronization is critical to the correctness and stability of the system. The communication between them changes their status. The status and the communication mechanism together have been regarded as a Deterministic Finite Automata(DFA). The communication mechanism is represented as several semantic communicating actions. This DFA-like structure makes it easier to add more new emulators in the future.ARTs-IDE is a embedded integrated development environment for ARTs-OS with independent intellectual copyrights. The emulator skyeye has been chosen to be integrated into ARTs-IDE. As a open-source software, skyeye is able for future improvement. All these feed the need of emulation tools of ARTs-IDE. ARTs-OS can run in skyeye successfully.Performance issues have been discussed during the usage of the integrated emulator. Dynamic Binary Translation technology is commonly used in many system emulator including skyeye. Much improvement has been applied to target code cache, which has great performance impact of a dynamic binary translation system. Refer to data locality, a new cache replacement policy called data-trace based cache replacement policy is put forward. The new policy has been tested in skyeye emulator, and is proved effective.