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IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator Overview

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The IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator is a simulation environment developed by IBM.

The IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator is a simulation environment developed by IBM. It is designed to provide enough POWER9 processor complex functionality to allow the entire software stack to execute, including loading, booting and running a little endian Linux environment. The intent for this tool is to educate, enable new application development, and to facilitate porting of existing Linux applications to the POWER9 architecture. While the IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator serves as a full instruction set simulator for the POWER9 processor, it may not model all aspects of the IBM Power Systems POWER9 hardware and thus may not exactly reflect the behavior of the POWER9 hardware.

Features

  • POWER9 hardware reference model
  • Full instruction set simulator for Power ISA as implemented in POWER9
  • Models complex SMP effects
  • Architectural modeled areas:
    • Functional behavior of all units (Load/Store, FXU, FPU, VMX, VSX, etc.)
    • Exceptions and Interrupt handling
    • Address translation, both Paravirtualized HPT and two level Radix Tree
    • Memory and basic translation cache modeling (SLBs, TLBs, ERATs)
  • Linux and Hypervisor development and debug platform
  • TCL command-line interface provides:
    • Custom user initialization scripts
    • Processor state control for debug: Step, Run, Cycle run-to, Stop, etc.
    • Register and Memory R/W interaction

Version information

Latest x86_64 RPM release: v1.1-0

Latest x86_64 DEB release: v1.1-0

Latest ppc64le DEB release: v1.1-1

Supported x86_64 host operating systems for running the IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator

  • Fedora 22 - 25
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2
  • SuSE 12.1
  • Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04

Supported PPC64le host operating systems for running the IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator

  • Ubuntu 18.04

Supported 64-bit Little Endian Linux distributions for booting the IBM POWER9 Functional Simulator

  • Debian 8.6 (jessie)
  • Other distributions may function, however, no testing has been performed

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Document Information

Modified date:
07 December 2021

UID

ibm16491149

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