Design and Implementation of a Simulation Framework for the ARM Embedded System

This paper proposes a basic ARM full system simulation framework, a novel approach to understanding the behavior of modern embedded systems. Our simulation framework implements the kernel architecture of the ARM ISA, on which one can run and debug system or user-level programs. It has flexible software architecture, and good encapsulation of the communication between virtual peripherals and host peripherals. On the other hand, we implement a remote debugging system based on our simulation kernel, which extends remote serial protocol (RSP) of GDB and using Eclipse as the front-UI to build a platform-independent system. Since the simulation kernel has the full control of the target programs, the debugging system provides a flexible mechanism to collect the simulation information. These allowed people use or extend it to build a new ARM development environment, in order to study the embedded systems or help investigating the embedded operating system and low-level software.