Deterministic event-based control of Virtual Platforms for MPSoC software debugging

Virtual Platforms (VPs) are advantageous to develop and debug complex software for multi- and many-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). VPs provide unrivalled controllability and visibility of the target, which can be exploited to examine bugs that cannot be reproduced easily in real hardware. However, VPs as used for debugging provide only traditional interfaces, such as step-based debuggers and traces, that do little to help with the enormous complexity of MPSoCs and their parallel software. Finding a bug is still largely left to the developer´s experience and intuition, using manual means rather than automated solutions. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a novel VP debug visualization and control framework for concurrent software that allows examining and steering the target by means of an abstract representation of its inter-task interactions. Our framework reduces the effort required to understand complex concurrency patterns and helps to expose bugs.