A Retargetable Full System Simulator for Thin Client Platform

There are varieties of hardware designs in high-end embedded systems, and the applications on it cover embedded areas and low-end desktop areas. Thin client is a typical high-embedded system in client/server and browser/server environment, which combines local and remote computing resources. This paper presents the design and implementation of Unichos, a full system simulator for thin client platform. Unichos focuses on retargetability for more architectures of thin client platforms by combining the retargetable instruction template and the extensible device model. Unichos models the complete target hardware system in object-oriented structure, and supports the unmodified Linux 2.4 kernel and all of the applications for thin client. In addition, Unichos can flexibly provide support for performance simulation in different level of detail. Finally, we introduce two case studies based on Unichos, which demonstrate the advantages of Unichos in performance evaluation.