The increasing need for rapid prototyping coupled with the high cost of specialized
hardware development platforms and supply chain disruptions has stimulated
a significant interest in emulation solutions for embedded system development.
This thesis presents a detailed evaluation of the performance of the open-source
QEMU emulator for the RISC-V architecture. The primary research objective
was to determine the extent to which QEMU accurately emulates the behavior
of a real RISC-V system and to analyze the impact of its use on the overall speed
and efficiency of the development process.
The methodological approach involved a comprehensive comparative analysis
of algorithm execution speeds. These benchmarks were executed on both the
QEMU virtual platform and a physical development board. Additionally, the
correctness of interrupt handling and fault detection was thoroughly verified. All
tests and measurements were conducted using specialized tools from TASKING,
including the winIDEA integrated development environment, the fitIDEA automated
testing tool, and the winIDEA SDK.
The study confirmed that using the QEMU emulator for measuring computational
performance and code behavior involves a trade-off between accuracy
and performance. Nonetheless, virtual emulators proved to be a compelling and
efficient alternative for software testing scenarios. The use of QEMU was shown
to simplify procedures and accelerate test execution, significantly improving the
development workflow by reducing the reliance on physical hardware.
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