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Full system simulation seeks to strike a balance between accuracy and performance. Many of its possibilities have been obvious to practitioners in both academia and industry for quite some time, perhaps decades, but Simics supports more of these possibilities within a single framework than other tools do. Simics is a platform for full system simulation that can run actual firmware and completely unmodified kernel and driver code. It is sufficiently abstract to achieve tolerable performance levels, and it provides both functional accuracy for running commercial workloads and sufficient timing accuracy to interface to detailed hardware models. Simics can also run a heterogeneous network of systems from different vendors within the same framework. Exceptionally fast, Simics can easily add new components and leverage older ones within a practical abstraction level. It offers a platform with a rich API and a powerful scripting environment for use in a broad range of applications.
Magnusson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.