Some anecdata: gem5 is a simulator that aims to do precisely all that, and yes it is extremely slow. Probably on the order of 100x slower, but I don't have tim

Some anecdata: gem5 is a simulator that aims to do precisely all that, and yes it is extremely slow. Probably on the order of 100x slower, but I don't have timings to hand. Similarly booting a small processor compiled into C++ with verilator is very taxing on the processor too.