Low-Latency Communication Framework for Enterprise Server Simulation

Abstract

The article discusses a shared-memory-based tooling framework that facilitates firmware validation processes in enterprise-grade server environments. The framework enables low-latency communication between test harnesses and simulation environments, such as Wind River Simics, by overcoming the key weaknesses of conventional simulator interfaces: command-line and socket-based communications. The architecture uses a file that is memory-mapped and can be accessed by both the simulator and the client application, with powerful synchronisation, abstraction of the command, and autonomous performance. Evaluation of the performance of IBM Power firmware validation workflows can be shown to achieve significant benefits in execution time with respect to the traditional methodology, with direct applications to memory controller configuration, service processor execution, and power state validation. The ability of the framework to be flexible to a wide variety of simulation environments, such as QEMU and Gem5/SystemC environments, demonstrates that it is a more general method of minimising inter-process communication latency. Combination with continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines also increases the usefulness of the framework to enterprise firmware validation, allowing full automated testing and faster development cycles, and increasing system reliability of mission-critical applications.