Stringent power budgets in battery powered platforms have led to the development of energy saving techniques such as Dynamic Voltage and Frequency scaling (DVFS). For embedded system designers to be able to ripe the benefits of these techniques, support for efficient design space exploration must be available in system level simulators. The advent of the edge computing paradigm, with power constraints in the mW domain, has rendered this even more essential. Without a fast and accurate methodology for architecture simulation and energy estimation, the benefit of new ideas and solutions cannot be evaluated. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive application controlled DVFS management implementation in the GEM5 simulator, used with GEM5’s system call emulation mode. We also propose a novel architecture independent energy model based on categorization of different measurable workload classes. Our energy model is parametrized and calibrated with power measurements on a SAM4L microcontroller board, containing an ARM Cortex M4 processor. Together with the GEM5 output statistics, the model accurately estimates the total energy consumption of our simulated system. The results from our modified GEM5 simulator are validated with representative signal processing applications. After correction of systematic offset errors, our results deviate with less than 4% compared to measurements from the SAM4L microcontroller. Our contributions in this paper can easily be tailored to other processor models in GEM5 and to future versions of GEM5. It will therefore enable system architects to explore new techniques and compare the improvements relative to existing architectures.

电池供电平台中严格的功率预算导致了诸如动态电压和频率缩放（DVFS）之类的节能技术的发展。为了使嵌入式系统设计人员能够充分利用这些技术的优势，必须在系统级模拟器中提供对有效设计空间探索的支持。边缘计算范式的出现，在mW域中具有功率限制，这使得这一点变得更加重要。如果没有快速，准确的体系结构仿真和能源估算方法，就无法评估新思想和解决方案的收益。在本文中，我们提出了在GEM5仿真器中与GEM5的系统调用仿真模式一起使用的，非侵入式应用程序控制的DVFS管理实现。我们还基于不同可测量工作负载类别的分类，提出了一种新颖的与体系结构无关的能源模型。我们的能源模型在包含ARM Cortex M4处理器的SAM4L微控制器板上通过功率测量进行参数化和校准。结合GEM5输出统计信息，该模型可准确估算我们模拟系统的总能耗。我们改良的GEM5仿真器的结果已通过具有代表性的信号处理应用进行了验证。校正系统偏移误差后，与SAM4L微控制器的测量结果相比，我们的结果偏差不到4％。我们在本文中所做的贡献可以轻松地针对GEM5中的其他处理器模型以及GEM5的未来版本进行定制。