Integration of Pycachesim with QEMU

A modelling platform which can provide accurate measurement for delay with fast simulation speed is in high demand for embedded system design. Quick Emulator (QEMU) is an open source emulator capable of performing full system emulation without the need of having access to real target hardware. QEMU doesn’t emulate cache. Presence of cache significantly affects the memory latency. Hence, integrating cache is important to get approximate performance parameters for an instruction set simulator.In this study, Pycachesim (cache simulator) has been integrated with QEMU 6.1. Using this the instruction cache has been implemented. Our system has been tested by booting Linux OS and executing free Real Time OS (RTOS) based periodic application on ARM architecture. Our implementation can simulate multiple cache levels with different cache configurations giving an accurate number for stores, loads, hits and misses.