--- trunk/man/gxemul.1 2007/10/08 16:18:27 10 +++ trunk/man/gxemul.1 2007/10/08 16:18:38 12 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -.\" $Id: gxemul.1,v 1.24 2005/06/26 10:05:02 debug Exp $ +.\" $Id: gxemul.1,v 1.29 2005/08/10 15:51:09 debug Exp $ .\" .\" Copyright (C) 2004-2005 Anders Gavare. All rights reserved. .\" @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ .\" This is a minimal man page for GXemul. Process this file with .\" groff -man -Tascii gxemul.1 or nroff -man gxemul.1 .\" -.Dd JUNE 2005 +.Dd AUGUST 2005 .Dt GXEMUL 1 .Os .Sh NAME @@ -48,12 +48,16 @@ .Sh DESCRIPTION .Nm is an experimental instruction-level machine emulator. It can be used to -run binary code for (among others) MIPS-based machines, regardless of host +run binary code for MIPS-based machines, regardless of host platform. Several emulation modes are available. For some modes, processors and surrounding hardware components are emulated well enough to let unmodified operating systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine. .Pp +(Non-MIPS emulation modes are also under development, but so far none of +those modes has reached the completeness required to run unmodified +operating systems.) +.Pp There are three ways to invoke the emulator. When emulating a complete machine, settings can be entered directly on the command line, or they can be read from a configuration file. When emulating a userland @@ -97,6 +101,9 @@ .It Fl E Ar t Try to emulate machine type .Ar "t". +This option is not always needed, if the +.Fl e +option uniquely selects a machine. (Use .Fl H to get a list of types.) @@ -110,6 +117,10 @@ .Pp Other options: .Bl -tag -width Ds +.It Fl A +Disable load/store alignment checks in some cases. This might give a small +increase in performance, but the emulator will not run correctly if the +emulated code actually tries to do unaligned loads or stores. .It Fl B Disable dynamic binary translation. By default, bintrans will be turned on if the host+target architecture combination is @@ -300,7 +311,7 @@ The following command will start NetBSD/pmax on an emulated DECstation 5000/200 (3MAX): .Pp -.Dl "gxemul -E dec -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img" +.Dl "gxemul -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img" .Pp nbsd_pmax.img should be a raw disk image containing a bootable NetBSD/pmax filesystem. @@ -326,11 +337,14 @@ There are many bugs. Some of the known bugs are listed in the BUGS file in the .Nm -source distribution, some are indirectly mentioned in the TODO file. +source distribution, some are indirectly mentioned in the TODO file, +and some are mentioned in the source code itself. .Pp The binary translation subsystem is really terrible, but it is less terrible than running without it. .Pp +Userland (syscall-only) emulation doesn't really work yet. +.Pp .Nm does not simulate individual pipe-line stages or penalties caused by branch-prediction misses or cache misses, so it cannot be used for