Components

While individual objects are indeed very useful and can be instantiated multiple times connected different ways. The are problematic from a number of reasons.

Many systems consist of many different objects (e.g. an ASIC may have several processors, a couple of I/O models and potentially several additional devices).

Although, while the TEMU command line scripts can be used to construct arbitrary object graphs, it is problematic in the command line as one need to ensure the unique naming of different objects. In the case multiple processors need to be instantiated, several otherwise identical objects need to be created with unique names and attached to the correct CPU and / or memory space objects.

To solve this issue, TEMU provides an internal model called "Component". A component is a collection of objects and exported (and potentially renamed) interfaces.

If you are familiar with software components and e.g. the SMP2 simulator standard, this will sound familiar, and indeed. The TEMU components are modelled after such approaches.

While the generic Component class is useful to construct objects with a unique namespace, the real power comes in the component sub-classes. These sub-classes provide custom constructors and destructors that allow them to create a whole system when they are instantiated.

For example, the SPARCv8 target is bundled with the following components:

While these can be constructed manually (there are example scripts for this in the sysconfig directory), they are easier to instantiate using the components.