/[gxemul]/trunk/man/gxemul.1
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Mon Oct 8 16:19:11 2007 UTC (16 years, 6 months ago) by dpavlin
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++ trunk/HISTORY	(local)
$Id: HISTORY,v 1.1004 2005/10/27 14:01:10 debug Exp $
20051011        Passing -A as the default boot arg for CATS (works fine with
                OpenBSD/cats).
20051012	Fixing the VGA cursor offset bug, and speeding up framebuffer
		redraws if character cells contain the same thing as during
		the last redraw.
20051013	Adding a slow strd ARM instruction hack.
20051017	Minor updates: Adding a dummy i80321 Verde controller (for
		XScale emulation), fixing the disassembly of the ARM "ldrd"
		instruction, adding "support" for less-than-4KB pages for ARM
		(by not adding them to translation tables).
20051020	Continuing on some HPCarm stuff. A NetBSD/hpcarm kernel prints
		some boot messages on an emulated Jornada 720.
		Making dev_ram work better with dyntrans (speeds up some things
		quite a bit).
20051021	Automatically generating some of the most common ARM load/store
		multiple instructions.
20051022	Better statistics gathering for the ARM load/store multiple.
		Various other dyntrans and device updates.
20051023	Various minor updates.
20051024	Continuing; minor device and dyntrans fine-tuning. Adding the
		first "reasonable" instruction combination hacks for ARM (the
		cores of NetBSD/cats' memset and memcpy).
20051025	Fixing a dyntrans-related bug in dev_vga. Also changing the
		dyntrans low/high access notification to only be updated on
		writes, not reads. Hopefully it will be enough. (dev_vga in
		charcell mode now seems to work correctly with both reads and
		writes.)
		Experimenting with gathering dyntrans statistics (which parts
		of emulated RAM that are actually executed), and adding
		instruction combination hacks for cache cleaning and a part of
		NetBSD's scanc() function.
20051026	Adding a bitmap for ARM emulation which indicates if a page is
		(specifically) user accessible; loads and stores with the t-
		flag set can now use the translation arrays, which results in
		a measurable speedup.
20051027	Dyntrans updates; adding an extra bitmap array for 32-bit
		emulation modes, speeding up the check whether a physical page
		has any code translations or not (O(n) -> O(1)). Doing a
		similar reduction of O(n) to O(1) by avoiding the scan through
		the translation entries on a translation update (32-bit mode
		only).
		Various other minor hacks.
20051029	Quick release, without any testing at all.

==============  RELEASE 0.3.6.2  ==============


1 dpavlin 18 .\" $Id: gxemul.1,v 1.35 2005/10/27 14:01:11 debug Exp $
2 dpavlin 2 .\"
3     .\" Copyright (C) 2004-2005 Anders Gavare. All rights reserved.
4     .\"
5     .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
6     .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
7     .\"
8     .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
9     .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
10     .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
11     .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
12     .\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
13     .\" 3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products
14     .\" derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
15     .\"
16     .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
17     .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
18     .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
19     .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
20     .\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
21     .\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
22     .\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
23     .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
24     .\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
25     .\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
26     .\" SUCH DAMAGE.
27     .\"
28     .\"
29     .\" This is a minimal man page for GXemul. Process this file with
30     .\" groff -man -Tascii gxemul.1 or nroff -man gxemul.1
31     .\"
32 dpavlin 14 .Dd OCTOBER 2005
33 dpavlin 2 .Dt GXEMUL 1
34     .Os
35     .Sh NAME
36     .Nm gxemul
37     .Nd an experimental machine emulator
38     .Sh SYNOPSIS
39     .Nm
40     .Op machine, other, and general options
41     .Op file Ar ...
42     .Nm
43     .Op general options
44 dpavlin 14 .Ar @configfile
45 dpavlin 2 .Nm
46     .Op userland, other, and general options
47     .Ar file Op Ar args ...
48     .Sh DESCRIPTION
49     .Nm
50 dpavlin 14 is an experimental instruction-level machine emulator. Several
51     emulation modes are available. In some modes, processors and surrounding
52     hardware components are emulated well enough to let unmodified operating
53     systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine.
54 dpavlin 2 .Pp
55 dpavlin 14 The processor architecture best emulated by GXemul is MIPS, but other
56     architectures are also partially emulated.
57 dpavlin 12 .Pp
58 dpavlin 18 MIPS processors are emulated either using a simple type of binary
59     translator (on Alpha and i386 hosts), or using traditional slow
60     interpretation (all other hosts, including amd64 machines running in
61     64-bit mode).
62     .Pp
63     Non-MIPS processors (e.g. ARM) are emulated using a newer dynamic
64     translation system (called dyntrans in the rest of this man page);
65     dyntrans does not require any host-specific code, so it should work on any
66     platform. Performance is somewhere between binary translation and
67     traditional interpretation.
68     .Pp
69 dpavlin 14 There are three ways to invoke the emulator:
70 dpavlin 2 .Pp
71 dpavlin 14 1. When emulating a complete machine, configuration options can be entered
72     directly on the command line.
73     .Pp
74     2. Options can be read from a configuration file.
75     .Pp
76     3. When emulating a userland environment (syscall-only emulation, not
77     emulating complete machines), then the program name and its argument
78     should be given on the command line. (This mode doesn't really work yet.)
79     .Pp
80 dpavlin 2 The easiest way to use the emulator is to supply settings directly on the
81     command line. The most important thing you need to supply is the
82 dpavlin 14 file argument. This is the name of a binary file (an ELF, a.out, COFF/ECOFF,
83 dpavlin 2 SREC, or a raw binary image) which you wish to run in the emulator. This file
84     might be an operating system kernel, or perhaps a ROM image file.
85     .Pp
86     If more than one filename is supplied, all files are loaded into memory,
87     and the entry point (if available) is taken from the last file.
88     .Pp
89     Apart from the name of a binary file, it is also necessary to select
90     which specific emulation mode to use. For example, a MIPS-based machine
91     from DEC (a DECstation) is very different from a MIPS-based machine
92     from SGI. Use
93     .Nm
94     .Fl H
95     to get a list of available emulation modes.
96     .Pp
97 dpavlin 6 There are two exceptions to the normal invocation usage mentioned above.
98     The first is for DECstation emulation: if you have a bootable
99 dpavlin 2 DECstation harddisk or CDROM image, then just supplying the diskimage via
100     the
101     .Fl d
102 dpavlin 6 option is sufficient. (The filename of the kernel can then be
103 dpavlin 2 skipped, as the emulator runs the bootblocks from the diskimage directly and
104     doesn't need the kernel as a separate file.)
105 dpavlin 6 The second is if you supply an ISO9660 CDROM disk image. You may then use
106     the
107     .Fl j
108     option to indicate which file on the CDROM filesystem that should be
109     loaded into emulated memory.
110 dpavlin 2 .Pp
111     Machine selection options:
112     .Bl -tag -width Ds
113     .It Fl E Ar t
114     Try to emulate machine type
115     .Ar "t".
116 dpavlin 12 This option is not always needed, if the
117     .Fl e
118     option uniquely selects a machine.
119 dpavlin 2 (Use
120     .Fl H
121     to get a list of types.)
122     .It Fl e Ar st
123     Try to emulate machine subtype
124     .Ar "st".
125     Use this together with
126     .Fl E .
127     (This option is not always needed, if a machine type has no subtypes.)
128     .El
129     .Pp
130     Other options:
131     .Bl -tag -width Ds
132 dpavlin 12 .It Fl A
133     Disable load/store alignment checks in some cases. This might give a small
134     increase in performance, but the emulator will not run correctly if the
135 dpavlin 16 emulated code actually tries to do unaligned loads or stores. (This option
136     is only meaningful when emulating MIPS CPUs, when the host architecture is
137     Alpha or i386, and binary translation is enabled.)
138 dpavlin 2 .It Fl B
139 dpavlin 10 Disable dynamic binary translation. By default, bintrans
140     will be turned on if the host+target architecture combination is
141 dpavlin 16 supported. Currently, the only supported target architecture for bintrans
142     is MIPS, and the supported host architectures are Alpha and i386.
143 dpavlin 2 .It Fl C Ar x
144     Try to emulate a specific CPU type,
145     .Ar "x".
146     This overrides the default CPU type for the machine being emulated.
147     (Use
148     .Fl H
149     to get a list of available CPU types.)
150     .It Fl d Ar name
151     Add
152     .Ar name
153     as a disk image. By adding one or more modifier characters and then a
154     colon (":") as a prefix to
155     .Ar "name",
156 dpavlin 6 you can modify the way the disk image is treated. Available modifiers are:
157 dpavlin 2 .Bl -tag -width Ds
158     .It b
159     Specifies that this is a boot device.
160     .It c
161 dpavlin 4 CD-ROM.
162 dpavlin 2 .It d
163 dpavlin 4 DISK (this is the default).
164     .It f
165     FLOPPY.
166 dpavlin 6 .It gH;S;
167     Override the default geometry; use H heads and S sectors-per-track.
168     (The number of cylinders is calculated automatically.)
169 dpavlin 2 .It i
170 dpavlin 4 IDE.
171 dpavlin 2 .It r
172     Read-only (don't allow changes to be written to the file).
173 dpavlin 4 .It s
174     SCSI (this is the default for most machine types).
175 dpavlin 2 .It t
176 dpavlin 4 Tape.
177 dpavlin 2 .It 0-7
178 dpavlin 6 Force a specific ID number.
179 dpavlin 2 .El
180     .Pp
181 dpavlin 14 Unless otherwise specified, filenames ending with ".iso" or ".cdr" are
182     assumed to be CDROM images. Most others are assumed to be disks. Depending
183     on which machine is being emulated, the default for disks can be either
184     SCSI or IDE. Some disk images that are very small are assumed to be floppy
185     disks. (If you are not happy with the way a disk image is detected, then
186     you need to use explicit prefixes to force a specific type.)
187 dpavlin 6 .Pp
188     For floppies, the gH;S; prefix is ignored. Instead, the number of
189     heads and cylinders are assumed to be 2 and 80, respectively, and the
190     number of sectors per track is calculated automatically. (This works for
191     720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB, and 2.88MB floppies.)
192 dpavlin 2 .It Fl I Ar x
193     Emulate clock interrupts at
194     .Ar x
195     Hz. (This affects emulated clock devices only, not actual runtime speed.
196     This disables automatic clock adjustments, which is otherwise turned on.)
197     (This option is probably only valid for DECstation emulation.)
198     .It Fl i
199     Display each instruction as it is being executed.
200     .It Fl J
201 dpavlin 18 Disable some speed tricks. For MIPS emulation, these are mostly
202     timing-related. For non-MIPS emulation (i.e. those modes using dyntrans),
203     this flag disables the use of "instruction combinations".
204 dpavlin 2 .It Fl j Ar n
205     Set the name of the kernel to
206     .Ar "n".
207 dpavlin 10 When booting from an ISO9660 filesystem, the emulator will try to boot
208     using this file. (In some emulation modes, eg. DECstation, this name is passed
209 dpavlin 6 along to the boot program. Useful names are "bsd" for OpenBSD/pmax,
210     or "vmunix" for Ultrix.)
211 dpavlin 2 .It Fl M Ar m
212     Emulate
213     .Ar m
214     MBs of physical RAM. This overrides the default amount of RAM for the
215     selected machine type.
216     .It Fl m Ar nr
217     Run at most
218     .Ar nr
219     instructions (on any cpu).
220     .It Fl N
221     Display nr of instructions/second average, at regular intervals.
222     .It Fl n Ar nr
223     Set nr of CPUs (for SMP experiments).
224     .It Fl O
225     Force a "netboot" (tftp instead of disk), even when a disk image is
226     present (for DECstation, SGI, and ARC emulation).
227     .It Fl o Ar arg
228 dpavlin 16 Set the boot argument (mostly useful for DEC, ARC, or SGI emulation).
229 dpavlin 2 Default
230     .Ar arg
231 dpavlin 16 for DEC is "-a", for ARC/SGI it is "-aN", and for CATS it is "-A".
232 dpavlin 2 .It Fl p Ar pc
233 dpavlin 6 Add a breakpoint. (Remember to use the "0x" prefix for hex.)
234 dpavlin 2 .It Fl Q
235     Disable the built-in PROM emulation. This is useful for running raw ROM
236     images from real machines.
237     .It Fl R
238     Use a random bootstrap cpu, instead of CPU nr 0. (For SMP experiments.)
239     .It Fl r
240     Dump register contents for every executed instruction.
241     .It Fl S
242     Initialize the emulated RAM to random data, instead of zeroes.
243     .It Fl T
244     Enter the single-step debugger on unimplemented memory accesses.
245     .It Fl t
246     Show a trace tree of all function calls being made.
247     .It Fl U
248     Enable slow_serial_interrupts_hack_for_linux.
249     .It Fl X
250     Use X11.
251     .It Fl x
252     Open up new xterms for emulated serial ports. (Default is to open up
253     xterms when using configuration files, but not when starting an
254     emulation with settings directly on the command line.)
255     .It Fl Y Ar n
256     Scale down framebuffer windows by
257     .Ar n
258     x
259     .Ar n
260     times.
261     .It Fl y Ar x
262     Set max_random_cycles_per_chunk to
263     .Ar x
264     (experimental).
265     .It Fl Z Ar n
266     Set the number of graphics cards, for emulating a dual-head or tripple-head
267     environment. (Only for DECstation emulation so far.)
268     .It Fl z Ar disp
269     Add
270     .Ar disp
271     as an X11 display to use for framebuffers.
272     .El
273     .Pp
274     Userland options:
275     .Bl -tag -width Ds
276     .It Fl u Ar emul-mode
277     Userland-only (syscall) emulation. (Use
278     .Fl H
279     to get a list of available emulation modes.) Some (but not all) of the
280     options listed under Other options above can also be used with userland
281     emulation.
282     .El
283     .Pp
284     General options:
285     .Bl -tag -width Ds
286     .It Fl D
287 dpavlin 6 Guarantee fully deterministic behavior. Normally, the emulator calls
288 dpavlin 2 srandom() with a seed based on the current time at startup. When the
289     .Fl D
290     option is used, the srandom() call is skipped, which should cause two
291 dpavlin 6 subsequent invocations of the emulator to be identical, if all other
292     settings are identical and no user input is taking place. (If this option
293     is used, then
294 dpavlin 2 .Fl I
295     must also be used.)
296     .It Fl H
297     Display a list of available CPU types, machine types, and userland
298     emulation modes. (Most of these don't work. Please read the documentation
299     included in the
300     .Nm
301     distribution for details on which modes that actually work.)
302     .It Fl h
303     Display a list of all available command line options.
304     .It Fl K
305     Force the single-step debugger to be entered at the end of a simulation.
306     .It Fl q
307     Quiet mode; this suppresses startup messages.
308     .It Fl s
309 dpavlin 18 For MIPS emulation: Show opcode usage statistics after the simulation.
310     For non-MIPS emulation (i.e. using dyntrans): Save statistics to a file at
311     regular intervals of which physical addresses that were executed.
312 dpavlin 2 .It Fl V
313     Start up in the single-step debugger, paused.
314     .It Fl v
315     Verbose debug messages.
316     .El
317     .Pp
318     Configuration file startup:
319     .Bl -tag -width Ds
320     .It @ Ar configfile
321     Start an emulation based on the contents of
322     .Ar "configfile".
323     .El
324     .Pp
325     For more information, please read the documentation in the doc/
326     subdirectory of the
327     .Nm
328     distribution.
329     .Sh EXAMPLES
330     The following command will start NetBSD/pmax on an emulated DECstation
331 dpavlin 10 5000/200 (3MAX):
332 dpavlin 2 .Pp
333 dpavlin 12 .Dl "gxemul -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img"
334 dpavlin 2 .Pp
335 dpavlin 10 nbsd_pmax.img should be a raw disk image containing a bootable
336 dpavlin 2 NetBSD/pmax filesystem.
337     .Pp
338     The following command will start an emulation session based on settings in
339     the configuration file "mysession". The -v option tells gxemul to be
340     verbose.
341     .Pp
342     .Dl "gxemul -v @mysession"
343     .Pp
344     If you have compiled the small Hello World program mentioned in the
345     .Nm
346     documentation, the following command will start up an
347     emulated test machine in "paused" mode:
348     .Pp
349     .Dl "gxemul -E testmips -V hello_mips"
350     .Pp
351     (Paused mode means that you enter the interactive single-step debugger
352     directly at startup, instead of launching the Hello World program.)
353     .Pp
354     Please read the documentation for more details.
355     .Sh BUGS
356     There are many bugs. Some of the known bugs are listed in the BUGS
357     file in the
358     .Nm
359 dpavlin 12 source distribution, some are indirectly mentioned in the TODO file,
360     and some are mentioned in the source code itself.
361 dpavlin 2 .Pp
362 dpavlin 10 The binary translation subsystem is really terrible, but it is less
363     terrible than running without it.
364 dpavlin 2 .Pp
365 dpavlin 12 Userland (syscall-only) emulation doesn't really work yet.
366     .Pp
367 dpavlin 16 Emulation of MIPS CPUs is done differently from other emulation modes; the
368     documentation sometimes only reflect the way things work with MIPS
369     emulation, and it is incorrect when applied to e.g. ARM emulation.
370     .Pp
371 dpavlin 2 .Nm
372     does not simulate individual pipe-line stages or penalties caused by
373 dpavlin 14 branch-prediction misses or cache misses, so it cannot be used for
374     accurate simulation of any actual real-world processor.
375 dpavlin 6 .Pp
376     .Nm
377     is not timing-accurate.
378 dpavlin 2 .Sh AUTHOR
379     Anders Gavare <anders@gavare.se>
380     .Pp
381     See http://gavare.se/gxemul/ for more information.

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