Protocol Offload Evaluation Using Simics

This paper describes our work with Simics (Magnusson, 2002) in the evaluation of protocol offloading to keep low the communication overheads on the host CPU. Simics is a platform that can be used for a functional system simulation, including the application program, the operating system, the protocol stack and the device drivers. Nevertheless, network-oriented applications require a full-system simulation that includes not only the OS code, but also a model of the memory system and a detailed timing model of network DMA effects (Binkert, 2003). As Simics does not provide a detailed network I/O model, it could present some limitations that make it difficult an accurate network-oriented full-system simulation. Here we present the way we have overcome this problem