vSoC: Efficient Virtual System-on-Chip on Heterogeneous Hardware

Emerging mobile apps such as UHD video and AR/VR access diverse high-throughput hardware devices, e.g., video codecs, cameras, and image processors. However, today's mobile emulators exhibit poor performance when emulating these devices. We pinpoint the major reason to be the discrepancy between the guest's and host's memory architectures for hardware devices, i.e., the mobile guest's centralized memory on a system-on-chip (SoC) versus the PC/server's separated memory modules on individual hardware. Such a discrepancy makes the shared virtual memory (SVM) architecture of mobile emulators highly inefficient.