Documentation Contents
Simics comes with many guides and manuals: the most important will be briefly
described here.
The documents presented here are listed—at least at the
beginning—in the order in which it makes most sense to read them. If you
have not installed Simics yet, we advise you start with the Simics's
Release Notes and the Installation Guide. If
you are a new user, Getting Started will give you an
overview of what you can achieve with Simics, as well as a good starting point
for entering the other manuals.
The main Release Notes document identifies important
information for the Simics 7 release. In addition to
listing the major changes and new features introduced in Simics
7, it also identifies the major known limitations and
other important information. All users, and particularly those who are
Simics system administrators, should review this document carefully.
Simics add-on packages may also provide a package-specific release notes
document.
This document describes how to install and configure the Simics product.
It is divided in two documents, one for Windows and one for Linux users.
The document identifies the hardware/software requirement for installing and running Simics
as well as the installation instructions. In addition, license configuration is
also covered. This document should be read by users installing Simics
themselves, and all system administrators for the Simics product.
This document provides users new to Simics a quick introduction on
how to effectively use the product. It describes the concepts and benefits of
Virtualized Systems Development, the products in the Simics family, and also
provides a tutorial and links to other Simics documents that will help a user
to become effective with Simics. This document should be read by any user new
to Simics or requiring a brief overview of the product.
This document covers the features of Simics. It explores the
environment provided by the Simics product and explain how to create,
inspect and modify simulations. It provides an introduction to software
either as a stand-alone debugger, or as a back-end for other debuggers such as
Wind River Workbench or GDB. It explains how to improve simulation speed by
making use of options such as page-sharing, multithreading and distributed
simulations.
This document describes the tools provided to analyze the target software
running in the simulation, such as cache simulation, process tracking and
debugging, and code coverage.
This document covers the usage of Ethernet networks in Simics, both as entirely
virtual networks between simulated systems, or when connecting the simulation
to real networks.
This introductory document gives an overview of the Simics product family,
listing features and product characteristics.
Each Virtual System add-on package is provided with a target guide that
describes the specifics of this particular board or platform. It contains
instructions on how to customize the platform and how to install new operating
systems. Users working on a specific virtual platform should read the
corresponding target guide.
Simics and all its add-on packages contain a reference manual. This document
lists all the commands available, as well as the components, classes, haps and
interfaces provided by the packages. The reference manual provided with Simics
also contains a description of the API functions available.
This document provides documentation for creating new models in Simics,
at the device and at the board level. It contains among other things a
tutorial and an overview of various topics relevant to modeling as
well as a more in-depth description of all aspects of modeling in
Simics, from the build environment to examples of complex models and
various topics that a developer may find useful. This document should
be read by users wanting to extend their simulation with their own
models or wishing to create their own simulated systems.
This document also provides documentation for creating simulator add-ons to Simics
that extend its functionality.
This document provides a complete description of the Simics® Device
Modeling Language (DML) and compiler. It is a very useful reference for all
model developers using DML for modeling.
Simics and its add-on packages contain more manuals than those listed
above:
- Application notes tend to deal with very specific subjects, such
as Understanding Simics Timing.
- Technology Guides cover the simulation of specific technologies, such
as RapidIO in Simics.
- Finally, programming guides are provided for specialized APIs such as
the Link Library or the C++ Device API.
Scripts, screen dumps and code fragments are presented in a
monospace font. In screen dumps, user input is always presented in
bold font, as in:
Welcome to the Simics prompt
simics> this is something that you should type
Artificial line breaks may be introduced to prevent the text from
being too wide. A small arrow pointing down indicates that the
interrupted text continues on the next line:
This is an artificial 
line break that should not be there.
The directory where the Simics Base package or any add-on package
is installed is referred to as
[simics], for example when mentioning the
[simics]/RELEASENOTES.html file. In the same way, the shortcut
[project] is used to point at the user's project directory.
The character "/" is used to separate directories and files, for Linux.
If you are using Windows, you should read the character as "\" instead.