Monitoring temporal SystemC properties

Abstract

Abstract-Monitoring temporal SystemC properties is crucial for the validation of functional and transaction-level models, yet the current SystemC standard provides no support for temporal specifications. In this work we describe a temporal monitoring framework for the SystemC specification language defined by Tabakov et al. at FMCAD'08. Our framework uses a very minimal modification of the SystemC kernel, exposing event notifications and simulation phases. The user code is instrumented to allow observation of the relevant parts of the model state. As proof of concept, we use the framework to specify and check properties of two SystemC models. We show that monitoring SystemC properties using this framework has reasonable overhead (0.01% -1%) and has decreasing marginal cost. Finally, we demonstrate that monitoring at different levels of abstraction requires very small changes to the specification and the generated monitors. Based on our empirical results we argue that the additional expressive powers and flexibility of the framework does not incur a serious performance hit.

Statistical Model Checking for SystemC Models

“…Therefore before we can define an execution trace we need a precise definition of the state of a SystemC model simulation. We are inspired by the definition of system state in [23], which consists of the state of the simulation kernel and the state of the SystemC model. We consider the external libraries as black boxes, meaning that their states are not exposed.…”

“…The implementation of MAG allows users to define a set of observed variables that is used with a temporal resolution to generate a monitor. The implementation based on the techniques in [23], in which a monitor and a file containing aspects are generated in order to automatically instrument the SystemC model with the help of AspectC++ [5] and establish a communication between the generated monitor and the instrumented model. The monitor evaluates the set of observed variables at every time point at which an event of the temporal resolution occurs during the SystemC model simulation to produce a new state.…”

“…Tabakov et al [23] proposed a framework for monitoring temporal SystemC properties. This framework allows users to express the properties to verify by fully exposing the semantics of the simulator as well as the user-code.…”

“…The framework contains two main components: a monitor that observes a set of execution traces of the MUV and a statistical model checker implementing a set of hypothesis testing algorithms. We use techniques similar to the one proposed by Tabakov et al [23] to automatically generate the monitor. The statistical model checker is implemented as a plugin of the checker Plasma Lab [2], in which the properties to be verified are expressed in Bounded Linear Temporal Logic (BLTL); (ii) we present a method that allows users to expose a rich set of usercode primitives in form of atomic propositions in BLTL.…”

An Analytic Evaluation of SystemC Encodings in Promela

“…Recent work on monitoring SystemC properties is discussed in [20]. The work needs to modify the SystemC scheduler and instrument the design to observe desirable properties during simulations.…”