This paper presents the open-source COREMU, a scalable and portable parallel emulation
framework that decouples the complexity of parallelizing full-system emulators from building
a mature sequential one. The key observation is that CPU cores and devices in current (and
likely future) multiprocessors are loosely-coupled and communicate through well-defined
interfaces. Based on this observation, COREMU emulates multiple cores by creating
multiple instances of existing sequential emulators, and uses a thin library layer to handle …