Adapting the DMTCP Plugin Model for Checkpointing of Hardware Emulation

Checkpoint-restart is now a mature technology. It allows a user to save and later restore the state of a running process. The new plugin model for the upcoming version 3.0 of DMTCP (Distributed MultiThreaded Checkpointing) is described here. This plugin model allows a target application to disconnect from the hardware emulator at checkpoint time and then re-connect to a possibly different hardware emulator at the time of restart. The DMTCP plugin model is important in allowing three distinct parties to seamlessly inter-operate. The three parties are: the EDA designer, who is concerned with formal verification of a circuit design; the DMTCP developers, who are concerned with providing transparent checkpointing during the circuit emulation; and the hardware emulator vendor, who provides a plugin library that responds to checkpoint, restart, and other events. The new plugin model is an example of process-level virtualization: virtualization of external abstractions from within a process. This capability is motivated by scenarios for testing circuit models with the help of a hardware emulator. The plugin model enables a three-way collaboration: allowing a circuit designer and emulator vendor to each contribute separate proprietary plugins while sharing an open source software framework from the DMTCP developers. This provides a more flexible platform, where different fault injection models based on plugins can be designed within the DMTCP checkpointing framework. After initialization, one restarts from a checkpointed state under the control of the desired plugin. This restart saves the time spent in simulating the initialization phase, while enabling fault injection exactly at the region of interest. Upon restart, one can inject faults or otherwise modify the remainder of the simulation. The work concludes with a brief survey of checkpointing and process-level virtualization.