Inside a Synthetic Simulation Platform

Recently, we introduced a synthetic simulation-only Simics target machine called QSP (Quick-Start Platform) and it's included in the latest version of Wind River Simics. The idea of QSP is to give every user a useful Simics target that allows them to immediately start using Simics and begin reaping the benefits of simulation for software development. In this blog post, we'll be taking a look under the hood of QSP to see how it works.

The idea behind QSP is to design a piece of virtual-only hardware that is as simple as possible, while still running real operating systems similar to how they work on ordinary hardware.

This is not a new idea. The Simics team and other simulation providers have done similar things in the past – but never with the bottom-up design done with Simics QSP.

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