Since I have a certain interest in debugging, I was happy find the article “Guidelines for SystemC – Debugger Integration” at the usually interesting Design and Reuse website. However, I must say that it was pretty disappointing.
The key idea of the article is to put the debug service in a thread and the debugged SystemC system in another thread, and stop SystemC using a mutex. Yes, you have to do that.
But the really interesting part is how to connect the debugger into the virtual platform, and what that requires from the models and processors and the infrastructure. Unfortunately, the article is pretty silent on that. There is some talk of breakpoint handling required in the ISS, and how to update target memory that mostly corresponds to the debug interface of SystemC TLM-2.0 in scope.
Also, nothing about multicore debug and how to deal with temporal decoupling and debugging, or the need for repeatability across runs. Or breakpoints on things like hardware accesses and internal actions in the simulator.
Too bad.