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IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator Overview

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The IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator is a simulation environment developed by IBM.

The IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator is a simulation environment developed by IBM. It is designed to provide enough POWER8 processor complex functionality to allow the entire software stack to execute, including loading, booting and running a Fedora 20 BE (Big Endian) kernel image or a Debian LE (Little Endian) kernel image. The intent for this tool is to educate, enable new application development, and to facilitate porting of existing Linux applications to the POWER8 architecture. While the IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator serves as a full instruction set simulator for the POWER8 processor, it may not model all aspects of the IBM Power Systems POWER8 hardware and thus may not exactly reflect the behavior of the POWER8 hardware.

Features

  • POWER8 hardware reference model
  • Models complex SMP effects
  • Architectural modeled areas:
    • Functional units (Load/Store, FXU, FPU, etc.)
    • Pipeline
    • Exceptions and Interrupt handling
    • Address translation
    • Memory and basic cache modeling (SLBs, TLBs, ERATs)
  • Linux and Hypervisor development and debug platform
  • Boots Fedora 20 (BE) and Debian (LE) kernel images
  • 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

Initial RPM release: v1.0-1

Current RPM release: v1.0-2

Current deb release: v1.0-2

Supported x86_64 host operating systems for running the IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator

  • Fedora 20
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0
  • Suse 12
  • Ubuntu 14.10
  • Ubuntu 14.04

Supported 64-bit Big Endian Linux distributions for booting the IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator

  • Fedora 20
  • Other distributions may function, however, no testing has been performed

Supported 64-bit Little Endian Linux distributions for booting the IBM POWER8 Functional Simulator

  • Debian jessie/sid
  • Other distributions may function, however, no testing has been performed

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Document Information

Modified date:
06 December 2021

UID

ibm16491151

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