I did a lot of work on hardware drivers and control software, and true testing would often require designing a mock that could cost a million, easy.
I've had issues, with "easy mocks"[0].
A good testing mock needs to be of at least the same Quality level as a shipping device.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/concrete-galoshes/#story_time
And if you want to spend the time to write a faster "expensive mock" in software, you can run your tests in a "side-by-side" environment to fix any differences (including timing) between the implementations.
Can you perhaps do a write-up of what you've done and how "slow" it was, and if you've got ideas to make it faster?
Once it's actually successfully run through Verilator, it's a C++ interface. Very easy to integrate if your sim already has a notion of "clock tick."
With hardware, I try to ask for simulated HW based on the designs, but I usually don't get ever it.
if something doesn't work on actual hardware, now we're in a really good place to have to a conversation. clearly the simulator differs from the actual design, and we can just focus on sussing that out. otherwise the conversation can be alot more difficult and can devolve into 'hardware's broken' vs 'software person doesn't have a clue'.
unfortunately I disagree - it needs to be the same quality as the device. If youe mock is reliable but your device isn't, you have a problem.
That was actually sort of the problem I had, in my story.