Linux/SimOS: A Complete System Simulation Environment for Evaluating High-Speed Communication Systems 1
Chul-Ho Won, Ben Lee, Chansu Yu, Sangman Moh, Kyoung Park, Myung‐Joon Kim · 2002
This paper presents a performance study of UDP/IP and M-VIA using Linux/SimOS. Linux/SimOS is a Linux operating system port to a complete machine simulator SimOS. A complete machine simulator includes all the system components, such as CPU, memory, I/O devices, etc., and models them in suffi- cient detail to run an operating system. Therefore, a real program execution environment can be set up on the simulator to perform detailed system evaluation in a non-intrusive manner. The motivation for Linux/SimOS is to alleviate the limitations of SimOS (and its variants), which only support proprietary operating systems. Therefore, the availability of the popular Linux operating system for a complete ma- chine simulator will make it an extremely effective and flexible open-source simulation environment for studying all aspects of computer system performance, especially evaluating communication protocols and network interfaces. The contributions made in this paper are two-fold: First, the major modifications that were necessary to run Linux on SimOS are described. These modifications are specific to SimOS I/O device models and thus any future operating system porting efforts to SimOS will experience similar challenges. Second, a detailed analysis of the UDP/IP protocol and M-VIA is performed to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux/SimOS. The simulation study shows that Linux/SimOS is capable of capturing all aspects communication performance, including the effects of the kernel, device driver, and network interface.