PQEMU: A Parallel System Emulator Based on QEMU

Abstract

A full system emulator, such as QEMU, can provide a versatile virtual platform for software development. However, most current system simulators do not have sufficient support for multi-processor emulations to effectively utilize the underlying parallelism presented by today's multi-core processors. In this paper, we focus on parallelizing a system emulator and implement a prototype parallel emulator based on the widely used QEMU. Using this parallel QEMU, emulating an ARM11MPCore platform on a quad-core Intel i7 machine with the SPLASH-2 benchmarks, we have achieved 3.8x speedup over the original QEMU design. We have also evaluated and compared the performance impact of two different parallelization strategies, one with minimum sharing among emulated CPU, and one with maximum sharing.