A PCI bus simulation framework and some simulation results on PCI standard 2.1 latency limitations

Abstract

We describe a simulation environment that allows us to simulate the standard peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus protocol, as well as modified PCI protocols. While there are standard benchmarks (such as the SPEC [IEEE Comput. 33 (7) (2000) 28] benchmarks) available for processor simulation, database system simulation, and now even for simulating embedded systems (from EDN Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium, EEMBC, http:// www.eembc.org), there are no standard benchmarks for simulating computer buses in general and specifically, for simulating the PCI bus. To address this problem we describe a methodology for gathering information about the PCI traffic from a real system, and to use this information in order to generate PCI cycles that drive the simulator for both standard and modified PCI protocols. Finally, we use the simulation environment to run experiments with various parameters of the standard PCI protocols, and an extension that involves transferring a hint about the expected latency on the data bus at the time the target ends the current burst transaction.