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20070616	Implementing the MIPS32/64 revision 2 "ror" instruction.
20070617	Adding a struct for each physpage which keeps track of which
		ranges within that page (base offset, length) that are
		continuously translatable. When running with native code
		generation enabled (-b), a range is added after each read-
		ahead loop.
		Experimenting with using the physical program counter sample
		data (implemented 20070608) together with the "translatable
		range" information, to figure out which physical address ranges
		would be worth translating to native code (if the number of
		samples falling within a range is above a certain threshold).
20070618	Adding automagic building of .index comment files for
		src/file/, src/promemul/, src src/useremul/ as well.
		Adding a "has been translated" bit to the ranges, so that only
		not-yet-translated ranges will be sampled.
20070619	Moving src/cpu.c and src/memory_rw.c into src/cpus/,
		src/device.c into src/devices/, and src/machine.c into
		src/machines/.
		Creating a skeleton cc/ld native backend module; beginning on
		the function which will detect cc command line, etc.
20070620	Continuing on the native code generation infrastructure.
20070621	Moving src/x11.c and src/console.c into a new src/console/
		subdir (for everything that is console or framebuffer related).
		Moving src/symbol*.c into a new src/symbol/, which should
		contain anything that is symbol handling related.
20070624	Making the program counter sampling threshold a "settings
		variable" (sampling_threshold), i.e. it can now be changed
		during runtime.
		Switching the RELEASE notes format from plain text to HTML.
		If the TMPDIR environment variable is set, it is used instead
		of "/tmp" for temporary files.
		Continuing on the cc/ld backend: simple .c code is generated,
		the compiler and linker are called, etc.
		Adding detection of host architecture to the configure script
		(again), and adding icache invalidation support (only
		implemented for Alpha hosts so far).
20070625	Simplifying the program counter sampling mechanism.
20070626	Removing the cc/ld native code generation stuff, program
		counter sampling, etc; it would not have worked well in the
		general case.
20070627	Removing everything related to native code generation.
20070629	Removing the (practically unusable) support for multiple
		emulations. (The single emulation allowed now still supports
		multiple simultaneous machines, as before.)
		Beginning on PCCTWO and M88K interrupts.
20070723	Adding a dummy skeleton for emulation of M32R processors.
20070901	Fixing a warning found by "gcc version 4.3.0 20070817
		(experimental)" on amd64.
20070905	Removing some more traces of the old "multiple emulations"
		code.
		Also looking in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib for
		X11 libs, when running configure.
20070909	Minor updates to the guest OS install instructions, in
		preparation for the NetBSD 4.0 release.
20070918	More testing of NetBSD 4.0 RC1.

1 dpavlin 12 <html><head><title>Gavare's eXperimental Emulator:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Technical details</title>
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7 dpavlin 44 <b>GXemul:</b></font>&nbsp;&nbsp;
8 dpavlin 4 <font color="#000000" size="6"><b>Technical details</b>
9     </font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table><p>
10 dpavlin 2
11     <!--
12    
13 dpavlin 44 $Id: technical.html,v 1.77 2007/06/23 16:59:35 debug Exp $
14 dpavlin 2
15 dpavlin 34 Copyright (C) 2004-2007 Anders Gavare. All rights reserved.
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41    
42    
43 dpavlin 12
44 dpavlin 2 <a href="./">Back to the index</a>
45    
46     <p><br>
47     <h2>Technical details</h2>
48    
49 dpavlin 10 <p>This page describes some of the internals of GXemul.
50 dpavlin 2
51     <p>
52     <ul>
53 dpavlin 10 <li><a href="#speed">Speed and emulation modes</a>
54 dpavlin 2 <li><a href="#net">Networking</a>
55     <li><a href="#devices">Emulation of hardware devices</a>
56     </ul>
57    
58    
59    
60    
61    
62    
63     <p><br>
64     <a name="speed"></a>
65 dpavlin 10 <h3>Speed and emulation modes</h3>
66 dpavlin 2
67 dpavlin 14 So, how fast is GXemul? There is no short answer to this. There is
68 dpavlin 10 especially no answer to the question <b>What is the slowdown factor?</b>,
69     because the host architecture and emulated architecture can usually not be
70     compared just like that.
71 dpavlin 2
72 dpavlin 10 <p>Performance depends on several factors, including (but not limited to)
73 dpavlin 24 host architecture, target architecture, host clock speed, which compiler
74     and compiler flags were used to build the emulator, what the workload is,
75     what additional runtime flags are given to the emulator, and so on.
76 dpavlin 2
77 dpavlin 24 <p>Devices are generally not timing-accurate: for example, if an emulated
78     operating system tries to read a block from disk, from its point of view
79     the read was instantaneous (no waiting). So 1 MIPS in an emulated OS might
80     have taken more than one million instructions on a real machine.
81    
82 dpavlin 10 <p>Also, if the emulator says it has executed 1 million instructions, and
83     the CPU family in question was capable of scalar execution (i.e. one cycle
84     per instruction), it might still have taken more than 1 million cycles on
85     a real machine because of cache misses and similar micro-architectural
86     penalties that are not simulated by GXemul.
87 dpavlin 2
88 dpavlin 10 <p>Because of these issues, it is in my opinion best to measure
89     performance as the actual (real-world) time it takes to perform a task
90 dpavlin 24 with the emulator, e.g.:
91 dpavlin 2
92 dpavlin 24 <ul>
93     <li>"How long does it take to install NetBSD onto a disk image?"
94     <li>"How long does it take to compile XYZ inside NetBSD
95     in the emulator?".
96     </ul>
97    
98 dpavlin 14 <p>So, how fast is it? :-)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Answer: it varies.
99    
100 dpavlin 2
101    
102    
103    
104    
105    
106     <p><br>
107     <a name="net"></a>
108     <h3>Networking</h3>
109    
110 dpavlin 42 <font color="#ff0000">NOTE/TODO: This section is very old.</font>
111 dpavlin 2
112 dpavlin 10 <p>Running an entire operating system under emulation is very interesting
113     in itself, but for several reasons, running a modern OS without access to
114     TCP/IP networking is a bit akward. Hence, I feel the need to implement
115     TCP/IP (networking) support in the emulator.
116    
117 dpavlin 2 <p>
118     As far as I have understood it, there seems to be two different ways to go:
119    
120     <ol>
121     <li>Forward ethernet packets from the emulated ethernet controller to
122     the host machine's ethernet controller, and capture incoming
123     packets on the host's controller, giving them back to the
124     emulated OS. Characteristics are:
125     <ul>
126     <li>Requires <i>direct</i> access to the host's NIC, which
127     means on most platforms that the emulator cannot be
128     run as a normal user!
129     <li>Reduced portability, as not every host operating system
130     uses the same programming interface for dealing with
131     hardware ethernet controllers directly.
132     <li>When run on a switched network, it might be problematic to
133     connect from the emulated OS to the OS running on the
134     host, as packets sent out on the host's NIC are not
135     received by itself. (?)
136 dpavlin 6 <li>All specific networking protocols will be handled by the
137     physical network.
138 dpavlin 2 </ul>
139     <p>
140     or
141     <p>
142     <li>Whenever the emulated ethernet controller wishes to send a packet,
143     the emulator looks at the packet and creates a response. Packets
144     that can have an immediate response never go outside the emulator,
145     other packet types have to be converted into suitable other
146     connection types (UDP, TCP, etc). Characteristics:
147     <ul>
148     <li>Each packet type sent out on the emulated NIC must be handled.
149     This means that I have to do a lot of coding.
150     (I like this, because it gives me an opportunity to
151     learn about networking protocols.)
152     <li>By not relying on access to the host's NIC directly,
153     portability is maintained. (It would be sad if the networking
154     portion of a portable emulator isn't as portable as the
155     rest of the emulator.)
156     <li>The emulator can be run as a normal user process, does
157     not require root privilegies.
158     <li>Connecting from the emulated OS to the host's OS should
159     not be problematic.
160     <li>The emulated OS will experience the network just as a single
161     machine behind a NAT gateway/firewall would. The emulated
162     OS is thus automatically protected from the outside world.
163     </ul>
164     </ol>
165    
166 dpavlin 6 <p>
167     Some emulators/simulators use the first approach, while others use the
168     second. I think that SIMH and QEMU are examples of emulators using the
169     first and second approach, respectively.
170 dpavlin 2
171     <p>
172     Since I have choosen the second kind of implementation, I have to write
173     support explicitly for any kind of network protocol that should be
174     supported. As of 2004-07-09, the following has been implemented and seems
175     to work under at least NetBSD/pmax and OpenBSD/pmax under DECstation 5000/200
176     emulation (-E dec -e 3max):
177    
178     <p>
179     <ul>
180     <li>ARP requests sent out from the emulated NIC are interpreted,
181     and converted to ARP responses. (This is used by the emulated OS
182     to find out the MAC address of the gateway.)
183     <li>ICMP echo requests (that is the kind of packet produced by the
184 dpavlin 6 <b><tt>ping</tt></b> program) are interpreted and converted to ICMP echo
185 dpavlin 2 replies, <i>regardless of the IP address</i>. This means that
186     running ping from within the emulated OS will <i>always</i>
187     receive a response. The ping packets never leave the emulated
188     environment.
189     <li>UDP packets are interpreted and passed along to the outside world.
190     If the emulator receives an UDP packet from the outside world, it
191     is converted into an UDP packet for the emulated OS. (This is not
192     implemented very well yet, but seems to be enough for nameserver
193     lookups, tftp file transfers, and NFS mounts using UDP.)
194     <li>TCP packets are interpreted one at a time, similar to how UDP
195     packets are handled (but more state is kept for each connection).
196     <font color="#ff0000">NOTE: Much of the TCP handling code is very
197     ugly and hardcoded.</font>
198 dpavlin 6 <!--
199 dpavlin 2 <li>RARP is not implemented yet. (I haven't needed it so far.)
200 dpavlin 6 -->
201 dpavlin 2 </ul>
202    
203 dpavlin 6 <p>
204 dpavlin 2 The gateway machine, which is the only "other" machine that the emulated
205     OS sees on its emulated network, works as a NAT-style firewall/gateway. It
206 dpavlin 6 usually has a fixed IPv4 address of <tt>10.0.0.254</tt>. An OS running in
207     the emulator would usually have an address of the form <tt>10.x.x.x</tt>;
208     a typical choice would be <tt>10.0.0.1</tt>.
209 dpavlin 2
210     <p>
211 dpavlin 6 Inside emulated NetBSD/pmax or OpenBSD/pmax, running the following
212     commands should configure the emulated NIC:
213 dpavlin 2 <pre>
214     # <b>ifconfig le0 10.0.0.1</b>
215     # <b>route add default 10.0.0.254</b>
216     add net default: gateway 10.0.0.254
217     </pre>
218    
219 dpavlin 6 <p>
220 dpavlin 2 If you want nameserver lookups to work, you need a valid /etc/resolv.conf
221     as well:
222     <pre>
223     # <b>echo nameserver 129.16.1.3 > /etc/resolv.conf</b>
224     </pre>
225 dpavlin 6 (But replace <tt>129.16.1.3</tt> with the actual real-world IP address of
226     your nearest nameserver.)
227    
228 dpavlin 2 <p>
229     Now, host lookups should work:
230     <pre>
231     # <b>host -a www.netbsd.org</b>
232     Trying null domain
233     rcode = 0 (Success), ancount=2
234     The following answer is not authoritative:
235     The following answer is not verified as authentic by the server:
236     www.netbsd.org 86400 IN AAAA 2001:4f8:4:7:290:27ff:feab:19a7
237     www.netbsd.org 86400 IN A 204.152.184.116
238     For authoritative answers, see:
239     netbsd.org 83627 IN NS uucp-gw-2.pa.dec.com
240     netbsd.org 83627 IN NS ns.netbsd.org
241     netbsd.org 83627 IN NS adns1.berkeley.edu
242     netbsd.org 83627 IN NS adns2.berkeley.edu
243     netbsd.org 83627 IN NS uucp-gw-1.pa.dec.com
244     Additional information:
245     ns.netbsd.org 83627 IN A 204.152.184.164
246     uucp-gw-1.pa.dec.com 172799 IN A 204.123.2.18
247     uucp-gw-2.pa.dec.com 172799 IN A 204.123.2.19
248     </pre>
249    
250 dpavlin 6 <p>
251     At this point, UDP and TCP should (mostly) work.
252 dpavlin 2
253 dpavlin 6 <p>
254     Here is an example of how to configure a server machine and an emulated
255     client machine for sharing files via NFS:
256 dpavlin 2
257 dpavlin 6 <p>
258     (This is very useful if you want to share entire directory trees
259     between the emulated environment and another machine. These instruction
260     will work for FreeBSD, if you are running something else, use your
261     imagination to modify them.)
262 dpavlin 2
263     <p>
264     <ul>
265     <li>On the server, add a line to your /etc/exports file, exporting
266     the files you wish to use in the emulator:<pre>
267     <b>/tftpboot -mapall=nobody -ro 123.11.22.33</b>
268     </pre>
269     where 123.11.22.33 is the IP address of the machine running the
270     emulator process, as seen from the outside world.
271     <p>
272     <li>Then start up the programs needed to serve NFS via UDP. Note the
273     -n argument to mountd. This is needed to tell mountd to accept
274     connections from unprivileged ports (because the emulator does
275     not need to run as root).<pre>
276     # <b>portmap</b>
277     # <b>nfsd -u</b> &lt;--- u for UDP
278     # <b>mountd -n</b>
279     </pre>
280     <li>In the guest OS in the emulator, once you have ethernet and IPv4
281     configured so that you can use UDP, mounting the filesystem
282     should now be possible: (this example is for NetBSD/pmax
283     or OpenBSD/pmax)<pre>
284     # <b>mount -o ro,-r=1024,-w=1024,-U,-3 my.server.com:/tftpboot /mnt</b>
285     or
286     # <b>mount my.server.com:/tftpboot /mnt</b>
287     </pre>
288     If you don't supply the read and write sizes, there is a risk
289     that the default values are too large. The emulator currently
290     does not handle fragmentation/defragmentation of <i>outgoing</i>
291     packets, so going above the ethernet frame size (1518) is a very
292     bad idea. Incoming packets (reading from nfs) should work, though,
293     for example during an NFS install.
294     </ul>
295    
296     The example above uses read-only mounts. That is enough for things like
297     letting NetBSD/pmax or OpenBSD/pmax install via NFS, without the need for
298     a CDROM ISO image. You can use a read-write mount if you wish to share
299     files in both directions, but then you should be aware of the
300     fragmentation issue mentioned above.
301    
302    
303    
304    
305    
306 dpavlin 10
307    
308 dpavlin 2 <p><br>
309     <a name="devices"></a>
310     <h3>Emulation of hardware devices</h3>
311    
312 dpavlin 42 Each file called <tt>dev_*.c</tt> in the
313     <a href="../src/devices/"><tt>src/devices/</tt></a> directory is
314 dpavlin 20 responsible for one hardware device. These are used from
315 dpavlin 42 <a href="../src/machines/"><tt>src/machines</tt></a><tt>/machine_*.c</tt>,
316     when initializing which hardware a particular machine model will be using,
317     or when adding devices to a machine using the <tt>device()</tt> command in
318     <a href="configfiles.html">configuration files</a>.
319 dpavlin 2
320 dpavlin 10 <p>(I'll be using the name "<tt>foo</tt>" as the name of the device in all
321     these examples. This is pseudo code, it might need some modification to
322 dpavlin 2 actually compile and run.)
323    
324 dpavlin 10 <p>Each device should have the following:
325 dpavlin 2
326     <p>
327     <ul>
328 dpavlin 10 <li>A <tt>devinit</tt> function in <tt>src/devices/dev_foo.c</tt>. It
329     would typically look something like this:
330 dpavlin 2 <pre>
331 dpavlin 22 DEVINIT(foo)
332 dpavlin 2 {
333 dpavlin 42 struct foo_data *d;
334 dpavlin 2
335 dpavlin 42 CHECK_ALLOCATION(d = malloc(sizeof(struct foo_data)));
336 dpavlin 22 memset(d, 0, sizeof(struct foo_data));
337 dpavlin 2
338     /*
339     * Set up stuff here, for example fill d with useful
340 dpavlin 42 * data. devinit contains settings like address, irq path,
341 dpavlin 2 * and other things.
342     *
343     * ...
344     */
345 dpavlin 42
346     INTERRUPT_CONNECT(devinit->interrupt_path, d->irq);
347 dpavlin 2
348     memory_device_register(devinit->machine->memory, devinit->name,
349     devinit->addr, DEV_FOO_LENGTH,
350 dpavlin 20 dev_foo_access, (void *)d, DM_DEFAULT, NULL);
351 dpavlin 2
352     /* This should only be here if the device
353     has a tick function: */
354     machine_add_tickfunction(machine, dev_foo_tick, d,
355     FOO_TICKSHIFT);
356    
357     /* Return 1 if the device was successfully added. */
358     return 1;
359     }
360     </pre><br>
361    
362 dpavlin 22 <p><tt>DEVINIT(foo)</tt> is defined as <tt>int devinit_foo(struct devinit *devinit)</tt>,
363     and the <tt>devinit</tt> argument contains everything that the device driver's
364     initialization function needs.
365    
366     <p>
367 dpavlin 10 <li>At the top of <tt>dev_foo.c</tt>, the <tt>foo_data</tt> struct
368     should be defined.
369 dpavlin 2 <pre>
370     struct foo_data {
371 dpavlin 42 struct interrupt irq;
372 dpavlin 2 /* ... */
373     }
374     </pre><br>
375 dpavlin 42 (There is an exception to this rule; some legacy code and other
376     ugly hacks have their device structs defined in
377     <tt>src/include/devices.h</tt> instead of <tt>dev_foo.c</tt>.
378     New code should not add stuff to <tt>devices.h</tt>.)
379 dpavlin 20 <p>
380 dpavlin 10 <li>If <tt>foo</tt> has a tick function (that is, something that needs to be
381     run at regular intervals) then <tt>FOO_TICKSHIFT</tt> and a tick
382     function need to be defined as well:
383 dpavlin 2 <pre>
384 dpavlin 20 #define FOO_TICKSHIFT 14
385 dpavlin 2
386 dpavlin 42 DEVICE_TICK(foo)
387 dpavlin 2 {
388 dpavlin 42 struct foo_data *d = extra;
389 dpavlin 2
390     if (.....)
391 dpavlin 42 INTERRUPT_ASSERT(d->irq);
392 dpavlin 2 else
393 dpavlin 42 INTERRUPT_DEASSERT(d->irq);
394 dpavlin 2 }
395     </pre><br>
396    
397 dpavlin 20 <li>Does this device belong to a standard bus?
398     <ul>
399     <li>If this device should be detectable as a PCI device, then
400     glue code should be added to
401     <tt>src/devices/bus_pci.c</tt>.
402     <li>If this is a legacy ISA device which should be usable by
403     any machine which has an ISA bus, then the device should
404     be added to <tt>src/devices/bus_isa.c</tt>.
405     </ul>
406     <p>
407 dpavlin 2 <li>And last but not least, the device should have an access function.
408     The access function is called whenever there is a load or store
409 dpavlin 22 to an address which is in the device' memory mapped region. To
410     simplify things a little, a macro <tt>DEVICE_ACCESS(x)</tt>
411     is expanded into<pre>
412     int dev_x_access(struct cpu *cpu, struct memory *mem,
413 dpavlin 2 uint64_t relative_addr, unsigned char *data, size_t len,
414     int writeflag, void *extra)
415 dpavlin 22 </pre> The access function can look like this:
416     <pre>
417     DEVICE_ACCESS(foo)
418 dpavlin 2 {
419     struct foo_data *d = extra;
420     uint64_t idata = 0, odata = 0;
421    
422 dpavlin 42 if (writeflag == MEM_WRITE)
423     idata = memory_readmax64(cpu, data, len);
424    
425 dpavlin 2 switch (relative_addr) {
426 dpavlin 42
427     /* Handle accesses to individual addresses within
428     the device here. */
429    
430     /* ... */
431    
432 dpavlin 2 }
433    
434     if (writeflag == MEM_READ)
435     memory_writemax64(cpu, data, len, odata);
436    
437     /* Perhaps interrupts need to be asserted or
438     deasserted: */
439     dev_foo_tick(cpu, extra);
440    
441     /* Return successfully. */
442     return 1;
443     }
444     </pre><br>
445     </ul>
446    
447     <p>
448 dpavlin 6 The return value of the access function has until 2004-07-02 been a
449 dpavlin 2 true/false value; 1 for success, or 0 for device access failure. A device
450     access failure (on MIPS) will result in a DBE exception.
451    
452     <p>
453     Some devices are converted to support arbitrary memory latency
454     values. The return value is the number of cycles that the read or
455     write access took. A value of 1 means one cycle, a value of 10 means 10
456     cycles. Negative values are used for device access failures, and the
457     absolute value of the value is then the number of cycles; a value of -5
458     means that the access failed, and took 5 cycles.
459    
460     <p>
461     To be compatible with pre-20040702 devices, a return value of 0 is treated
462 dpavlin 6 by the caller (in <tt>src/memory_rw.c</tt>) as a value of -1.
463 dpavlin 2
464    
465    
466    
467    
468    
469     </body>
470     </html>

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