SysRT: A modular multiprocessor RTOS simulator for early design space exploration

Modern embedded systems increasingly accommodate several applications running concurrently on a multiprocessor platform managed by a real-time operating system (RTOS). The increasing design complexity of such systems calls for good design tools to evaluate real-time performance during the very early stages of design. To this end, fast system-level simulators that allow for efficient hardware/software co-simulation are essential. In this paper, we present SysRT, a generic and highlevel RTOS simulator that is highly suited for early design space exploration (DSE). The simulator contains different types of application models and a modular RTOS kernel model, all developed in SystemC. Efficient and precise modeling of preemptive scheduling is achieved via an event-driven simulation approach, allowing simulations to be performed much faster than cycle-accurate simulations. At the same time, the kernel model is developed to be generic and modular to support for easy plugin of new schedulers as well as new resource sharing protocols. Comparing SysRT with state-of-art simulators, it achieves faster simulation speeds with an identically small simulation error. We demonstrate the flexibility of SysRT and its benefits for early DSE using experiments with a mixed workload executing on multiprocessor platforms with different numbers of cores.