ISA-independent post-silicon validation for the address translation mechanisms of modern microprocessors

Abstract

Post-silicon validation complements traditional simulation-based pre-silicon verification and offers very high throughput since validation programs run at the speed of the actual hardware. Detection of bugs in the address translation subsystem of a microprocessor is much less straightforward than other hardware blocks because the address translation is an implicit process, which does not have an easily observable output to architecture or program visible locations. Validation of the correctness of the address translation mechanisms (ATMs) of microprocessors is both very important and challenging problem. In this paper, we present an ISA-independent methodology for the post-silicon validation of the ATMs in modern microprocessors. We first capture the effects of design bugs in address translation, by presenting actual bugs scenarios reported for commercial chips. We also describe an effective method for the detection of bugs in all address translation hardware blocks. The validation programs of the method are self-checking, i.e. do not require a bug-free model to compare with. Our experimental evaluation on Gem5 simulator shows the effectiveness of the methodology in detecting bugs in the address translation hardware of an x86-64 microprocessor model.