GXEMUL(1)                  OpenBSD Reference Manual                  GXEMUL(1)

NAME
     gxemul - an experimental framework for full-system machine emulation

SYNOPSIS
     gxemul [machine, other, and general options] [file ...]
     gxemul [general options] @configfile
     gxemul [userland, other, and general options] file [args ...]

DESCRIPTION
     gxemul is a framework for full-system computer architecture emulation.
     Several processor architectures and machine types have been implemented.
     It is working well enough to allow unmodified "guest" operating systems
     (e.g. NetBSD) to run inside the emulator, as if they were running on real
     hardware.

     The emulator emulates (networks of) real machines. The machines may
     consist of ARM, MIPS, Motorola 88K, PowerPC, and SuperH processors, and
     various surrounding hardware components such as framebuffers, busses,
     interrupt controllers, ethernet controllers, disk controllers, and serial
     port controllers.

     The emulator can be invoked in the following ways:

     1. When emulating a complete machine, configuration options can be
     supplied directly on the command line.

     2. Options can be read from a configuration file.

     3. When emulating a userland environment (syscall-only emulation, not
     emulating complete machines), then the program name and its argument
     should be given on the command line. (This mode is not really usable
     yet.)

     The easiest way to use the emulator is to supply settings directly on the
     command line.

     The most important thing you need to supply is the file argument. This is
     the name of a binary file (an ELF, a.out, COFF/ECOFF, SREC, or a raw
     binary image) which you wish to run in the emulator. This file might be
     an operating system kernel, or perhaps a ROM image file.  If more than
     one filename is supplied, all files are loaded into memory, and the entry
     point (if available) is taken from the last file.

     Apart from the name of a binary file, you must also use the -E and/or -e
     options to select which emulation mode to use. This is necessary because
     the emulator cannot in general deduce this from the file being executed.
     For example, a MIPS-based machine from DEC (a DECstation) is very
     different from a MIPS-based machine from SGI. Use gxemul -H to get a list
     of available emulation modes.

     There are three exceptions to the normal invocation usage mentioned
     above.

     1. For DECstation emulation, if you have a bootable DECstation harddisk
     or CDROM image, then just supplying the diskimage via the -d option is
     sufficient. The filename of the kernel can then be skipped, as the
     emulator runs the bootblocks from the diskimage directly and doesn't need
     the kernel as a separate file.

     2. If you supply an ISO9660 CDROM disk image, then using the -j option to
     indicate a file on the CDROM filesystem to load is sufficient; no
     additional kernel filename needs to be supplied on the command line.

     3. For Dreamcast emulation, when booting e.g. a NetBSD/dreamcast CDROM
     image, it is enough to supply the disk image (with the correct ISO
     partition start offset). Bootblocks will be read directly from the CDROM
     image, and there is no need to supply the name of an external kernel on
     the command line.

     Gzipped kernels are automatically unzipped, by calling the external
     gunzip program, both when specifying a gzipped file directly on the
     command line and when loading such a file using the -j option.

     Machine selection options:

     -E t    Try to emulate machine type t.  This option is not always needed,
             if the -e option uniquely selects a machine.  (Use -H to get a
             list of types.)

     -e st   Try to emulate machine subtype st.  Use this together with -E.
             (This option is not always needed, if a machine type has no
             subtypes.)

     Other options:

     -C x    Try to emulate a specific CPU type, x.  This overrides the
             default CPU type for the machine being emulated.  (Use -H to get
             a list of available CPU types.)

     -d [modifiers:]filename
             Add filename as a disk image. By adding one or more modifier
             characters and then a colon (":") as a prefix to filename, you
             can modify the way the disk image is treated. Available modifiers
             are:

             b       Specifies that this is a boot device.

             c       CD-ROM.

             d       DISK (this is the default).

             f       FLOPPY.

             gH;S;   Override the default geometry; use H heads and S sectors-
                     per-track.  (The number of cylinders is calculated
                     automatically.)

             i       IDE. (This is the default for most machine types.)

             oOFS;   Set the base offset for an ISO9660 filesystem on a disk
                     image. The default is 0. A suitable offset when booting
                     from Dreamcast ISO9660 filesystem images, which are
                     offset by 11702 sectors, is 23965696.

             r       Read-only (don't allow changes to be written to the
                     file).

             s       SCSI.

             t       Tape.

             V       Add an overlay filename to an already defined disk image.
                     (A ID number must also be specified when this flag is
                     used. See the documentation for an example of how to use
                     overlays.)

             0-7     Force a specific ID number.

             For SCSI devices, the ID number is the SCSI ID. For IDE
             harddisks, the ID number has the following meaning:

             0       Primary master.

             1       Primary slave.

             2       Secondary master.

             3       Secondary slave.

             Unless otherwise specified, filenames ending with ".iso" or
             ".cdr" are assumed to be CDROM images. Most others are assumed to
             be disks. Depending on which machine is being emulated, the
             default for disks can be either SCSI or IDE. Some disk images
             that are very small are assumed to be floppy disks. (If you are
             not happy with the way a disk image is detected, then you need to
             use explicit prefixes to force a specific type.)

             For floppies, the gH;S; prefix is ignored. Instead, the number of
             heads and cylinders are assumed to be 2 and 80, respectively, and
             the number of sectors per track is calculated automatically.
             (This works for 720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB, and 2.88MB floppies.)

     -I hz   Set the main CPU's frequency to hz Hz. This option does not work
             for all emulated machine modes. It affects the way count/compare
             interrupts are faked to simulate emulated time = real world time.
             If the guest operating system relies on RTC interrupts instead of
             count/compare interrupts, then this option has no effect.

             Setting the frequency to zero disables automatic synchronization
             of emulated time vs real world time, and the count/compare system
             runs at a fixed rate.

     -i      Enable instruction trace, i.e. display disassembly of each
             instruction as it is being executed.

     -J      Disable instruction combinations in the dynamic translator.

     -j n    Set the name of the kernel to n.  When booting from an ISO9660
             filesystem, the emulator will try to boot using this file. (In
             some emulation modes, eg. DECstation, this name is passed along
             to the boot program. Useful names are "bsd" for OpenBSD/pmax,
             "vmunix" for Ultrix, or "vmsprite" for Sprite.)

     -M m    Emulate m MBs of physical RAM. This overrides the default amount
             of RAM for the selected machine type.

     -N      Display the number of executed instructions per second on
             average, at regular intervals.

     -n nr   Set the number of processors in the machine, for SMP experiments.

             Note 1: The emulator allocates quite a lot of virtual memory for
             per-CPU translation tables. On 64-bit hosts, this is normally not
             a problem. On 32-bit hosts, this can use up all available virtual
             userspace memory. The solution is to either run the emulator on a
             64-bit host, or limit the number of emulated CPUs to a reasonably
             low number.

             Note 2: SMP simulation is not working very well yet; multiple
             processors are simulated, but synchronization between the
             processors does not map very well to how real-world SMP systems
             work.

     -O      Force a "netboot" (tftp instead of disk), even when a disk image
             is present (for DECstation, SGI, and ARC emulation).

     -o arg  Set the boot argument (mostly useful for DEC, ARC, or SGI
             emulation).  Default arg for DEC is "-a", for ARC/SGI it is
             "-aN", and for CATS it is "-A".

     -p pc   Add a breakpoint.  pc can be a symbol, or a numeric value.
             (Remember to use the "0x" prefix for hexadecimal values.)

     -Q      Disable the built-in (software-only) PROM emulation. This option
             is useful for experimenting with running raw ROM images from real
             machines. The default behaviour of the emulator is to "fake"
             certain PROM calls used by guest operating systems (e.g. NetBSD),
             so that no real PROM image is needed.

     -R      Use a random bootstrap cpu, instead of CPU nr 0. (This option is
             only meaningful together with the -n option.)

     -r      Dump register contents for every executed instruction.

     -S      Initialize emulated RAM to random data, instead of zeroes. This
             option is useful when trying to trigger bugs in a program that
             occur because the program assumed that uninitialized memory
             contains zeros. (Use with care.)

     -s flags:filename
             Gather statistics based on the current emulated program counter
             value, while the program executes. The statistics is actually
             just a raw dump of all program counter values in sequence,
             suitable for post-analysis with separate tools. Output is
             appended to filename.

             The flags should include one or more of the following type
             specifiers:

             v       Virtual. This means that the program counter value is
                     used.

             p       Physical. This means that the physical address of where
                     the program is actually running is used.

             i       Instruction call. This type of statistics gathering is
                     practically only useful during development of the
                     emulator itself. The output is a list of addresses of
                     instruction call functions (ic->f), which after some
                     post-processing can be used as a basis for deciding when
                     to implement instruction combinations.

             The flags may also include the following optional modifiers:

             d       Disabled at startup.

             o       Overwrite the file, instead of appending to it.

             Statistics gathering can be enabled/disabled at runtime by using
             the "statistics_enabled = yes" and "statistics_enabled = no"
             debugger commands.

             When gathering instruction statistics using the -s option,
             instruction combinations are always disabled (i.e. an implicit -J
             flag is added to the command line).

     -T      Halt if the emulated program attempts to access non-existing
             memory.

     -t      Show a trace tree of all function calls being made.

     -U      Enable slow_serial_interrupts_hack_for_linux.

     -X      Use X11. This option enables graphical framebuffers.

     -x      Open up new xterms for emulated serial ports. The default
             behaviour is to open up xterms when using configuration files, or
             if X11 is enabled. When starting up a simple emulation session
             with settings directly on the command line, and neither -X nor -x
             is used, then all output is confined to the terminal that gxemul
             started in.

     -Y n    Scale down framebuffer windows by n x n times. This option is
             useful when emulating a very large framebuffer, and the actual
             display is of lower resolution. If n is negative, then there will
             be no scaledown, but emulation of certain graphic controllers
             will be scaled up by -n times instead. E.g. Using -2 with VGA
             text mode emulation will result in 80x25 character cells rendered
             in a 1280x800 window, instead of the normal resolution of
             640x400.

     -Z n    Set the number of graphics cards, for emulating a dual-head or
             tripple-head environment. (Only for DECstation emulation so far.)

     -z disp
             Add disp as an X11 display to use for framebuffers.

     Userland options:

     -u emul-mode
             Userland-only (syscall) emulation. (Use -H to get a list of
             available emulation modes.) Some (but not all) of the options
             listed under Other options above can also be used with userland
             emulation.

             Note: Userland (syscall) emulation does not really work yet.

     General options:

     -c cmd  Add cmd as a command to run before starting the simulation. A
             similar effect can be achieved by using the -V option, and
             entering the commands manually.

     -D      Causes the emulator to skip a call to srandom(). This leads to
             somewhat more deterministic behaviour than running without this
             option.  However, if the emulated machine has clocks or timer
             interrupt sources, or if user interaction is taking place (e.g.
             keyboard input at irregular intervals), then this option is
             meaningless.

     -H      Display a list of available CPU types, machine types, and
             userland emulation modes. (Most of these don't work. Please read
             the documentation included in the gxemul distribution for details
             on which modes that actually work. Userland emulation is not
             included in stable release builds, since it doesn't work yet.)

     -h      Display a list of all available command line options.

     -k n    Set the size of the dyntrans cache (per emulated CPU) to n MB.
             The default size is 48 MB.

     -K      Force the single-step debugger to be entered at the end of a
             simulation.

     -q      Quiet mode; this suppresses startup messages.

     -V      Start up in the single-step debugger, paused.

     -v      Increase verbosity (show more debug messages). This option can be
             used multiple times.

     Configuration file startup:

     @ configfile
             Start an emulation based on the contents of configfile.

     For more information, please read the documentation in the doc/
     subdirectory of the gxemul distribution.

EXAMPLES
     The following command will start NetBSD/pmax on an emulated DECstation
     5000/200 (3MAX):

           gxemul -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img

     nbsd_pmax.img should be a raw disk image containing a bootable
     NetBSD/pmax filesystem.

     The following command will start an emulation session based on settings
     in the configuration file "mysession". The -v option tells gxemul to be
     verbose.

           gxemul -v @mysession

     If you have compiled the small Hello World program mentioned in the
     gxemul documentation, the following command will start up an emulated
     test machine in "paused" mode:

           gxemul -E testmips -V hello_mips

     Paused mode means that you enter the interactive single-step debugger
     directly at startup, instead of launching the Hello World program.

     The paused mode is also what should be used when running "unknown" files
     for the first time in the emulator. E.g. if you have a binary which you
     think is some kind of MIPS ROM image, then you can try the following:

           gxemul -vv -E baremips -V 0xbfc00000:image.raw

     You can then use the single-stepping functionality of the built-in
     debugger to run the code in the ROM image, to see how it behaves. Based
     on that, you can deduce what machine type it was actually from (the
     baremips machine is not a real machine), and perhaps try again with
     another emulation mode.

     In general, however, real ROM images require much more emulation detail
     than GXemul provides, so they can usually not run.

     Please read the documentation for more details.

BUGS
     There are many bugs. Some of the known bugs are mentioned in the TODO
     file in the gxemul source distribution, some are marked as TODO in the
     source code itself.

     Userland (syscall-only) emulation, i.e. running a userland binary
     directly without simulating an entire machine, doesn't really work yet.

     gxemul is in general not cycle-accurate; it does not simulate individual
     pipe-line stages or penalties caused by branch-prediction misses or cache
     misses, so it cannot be used for accurate simulation of any actual real-
     world processor.

     gxemul is in general not timing-accurate. Many emulation modes try to
     make the guest operating system's clock run at the same speed as the host
     clock.  However, the number of instructions executed per clock tick can
     obviously vary, depending on the current CPU load on the host.

AUTHOR
     GXemul is Copyright (C) 2003-2009  Anders Gavare <anders@gavare.se>

     See http://gavare.se/gxemul/ for more information. For other Copyright
     messages, see the corresponding parts of the source code and/or
     documentation.

OpenBSD 5.0                    February 28, 2012                   OpenBSD 5.0
