1 Introduction

This document provides an introduction to the Intel Simics product and some of its features. Intel Simics is a full-system simulator mainly targeting software development and analysis. To do so, it provides hardware and software inspection, dynamic system configuration, hardware modelling tools, scripting, and a rich set of other features. Unlike many other virtual machine products, the Intel Simics simulator does not focus on being a hardware replacement, although it can be used in that way.

The introduction in this document is in the form of a few short step-by-step tutorials.

1.1 Conventions

• 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
  

• The character "/" is used to separate directories and files, for Linux. If you are using Windows, you should read the character as "\" instead.

1.2 Intel Simics Terminology

This section presents the terminology used throughout Intel Simics documentation.

• Intel Simics Packages are the installable packages. The packages are can be identified by number or by name. Noteworthy packages:
  • The Intel Simics Base package (#1000), referred to as the base package, containing the simulator.
  • Other packages are referred to as add-on packages, and these typically contains extra tools or simulated hardware targets.
• An Intel Simics installation is a set of installed Intel Simics packages.
• An Intel Simics project, referred to as the project is the workspace where the simulator is started. The project is configured with a set associated packages, at least the base package and possibly some add-on packages. Besides starting the simulator, the user can create custom start scripts and also read documentation for all packages available to the project.
• The Simics Command Line Interface, referred to as the CLI is the main interface to simulator for most users and is started by default. It is also possible to launch the simulator in non-interactive, batch mode, which can be useful when running tests. In the CLI, both Python and the Simics script language are available, and can be used interchangeably.
• The host, or the host machine is the computer where the Intel Simics simulator is running.
• The target machine or target system is the hardware being simulated.

To simulate a target machine, a configuration must be created. A configuration consists of objects, object hierarchy, properties, and connections between objects.

The default way of creating a configuration is to load a target. For legacy reasons, it is also possible to create configurations by running CLI or Python scripts.

When creating a configuration for a specific target machine, it is often possible to customize properties of the target machine. For targets, the configurable parameters are called target parameters. (see Simics User's Guide).

A simulation session can contain multiple target machines, for example when simulating a network.

For interaction with the target system, the simulator can show graphics consoles and serial consoles.