Towards Accurate RISC-V Full System Simulation via Component-Level Calibration
Journal article, 2025
Full-System (FS) simulation is essential for performance evaluation of complete systems that execute complex applications on a complete software stack consisting of an operating system and user applications. Nevertheless, they require careful fine-tuning against real hardware to obtain reliable performance statistics, which can become tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming with typical trial-and-error approaches. We propose a novel, streamlined, component-level calibration methodology to address these shortcomings to validate FS simulation models. Our methodology greatly accelerates the validation process without sacrificing accuracy. It is Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-agnostic, and can tackle hardware specifications at different levels of detail. We demonstrate its effectiveness by validating FS models against both open-hardware and IP-protected (closed hardware) RISC-V silicon, achieving a mean error of 19%-23% for the SPEC CPU2017 suite in the two cases. We introduce the first open-source RISC-V-based FS-validated simulation models with a complete and replicable methodology.
full-system (FS) simulation
performance validation
Architectural simulator
Author
Karan Pathak
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
HEIG-VD
Delft University of Technology
Joshua Klein
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
Giovanni Ansaloni
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
Said Hamdioui
Delft University of Technology
Georgi Gaydadjiev
Delft University of Technology
University of Gothenburg
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)
Marina Zapater
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
HEIG-VD
David Atienza
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
1539-9087 (ISSN) 15583465 (eISSN)
Vol. 24 4 57Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Computer Systems
DOI
10.1145/3737876