The minimum hardware requirements are:
- 64-bit Intel® Architecture processor, either Haswell or newer performance core
(“big core”) architecture, or Gracemont or newer efficiency core (Atom)
architecture.
- VMP requires that Intel® Architecture (Intel® VT-x) is enabled in UEFI/BIOS
and visible to the VMXMON kernel module.
- 16 GB of RAM.
- 8 GB of disk space.
More RAM and/or disk is often necessary, depending on the requirements of the
simulated machine.
For best performance, we recommend:
- A host with at least 32 GB of RAM.
- A host processor with a high clock speed, 4GHz or more.
- At least two host cores per simulation running simultaneously (in
particular, check processor allocations in containers and virtual
machines).
- Since a more recent host processor will run faster than older generations, try
to use the most modern Intel® Architecture processor possible.
- Use fast local storage for the simulator swap.
- Faster memory (RAM) can help, but is not as important as the processor
core itself.
For maximum performance when simulating Intel® Architecture targets, the Intel®
Simics® Simulator can use virtualization (also known as VMP or
VMXMON). The use of virtualization requires an Intel processor with
Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for IA-32, Intel® 64 and
Intel® Architecture (Intel® VT-x).
- The best performance from virtualization is obtained when the host
is as close to the target as possible. In particular, simulating an
Intel® Architecture Server is usually best done on an Intel®
Architecture Server host of the most recent generation.
- Note that running Intel® Simics® simulations in a virtual machine
typically prevents Intel® VT-x from being used or causes it to run
with a significant reduction in speed. If isolation between
simulator instances is desired, use containers on Linux instead as
they normally allow the use of custom drivers on the host.
Run Time Requirements
A modern Linux distribution (1), with at least
- GLIBC 2.22 or later.
- GTK 2.24 or later — for the GUI.
- Linux 4.12 or later and GCC 9.0 or later — for VMXMON driver compilation.
Supported examples are Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 (and newer) and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 8 (and newer).
When running Simics with a user provided Python, or when using Simics as a
Python module, Python version 3.10 or later is required.
Model Builder Requirements
- GCC 6.3 compiler. Recommended to use GCC 15 or later (this is required to
build distributed non-sample models).
- Typical GNU-based development environment, with GNU Make 4.1 or later.
- Optional: CMake version 3.4 or later.
- For SystemC*, see footnote (2).
Run Time Requirements
When running Simics with a user provided Python, or when using Simics as a
Python module, Python version 3.10 or later is required.
Model Builder Requirements
- MinGW GCC 6.3 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 compiler (3).
Recommended to use MinGW GCC 15 or later, built for UCRT and POSIX threads
(this is required to build distributed non-sample models).
- MinGW development environment, with GNU Make 4.1 or later.
- Optional: CMake version 3.4 or later.
- For SystemC*, see footnote (2).
Simics needs a Python installation to run. The minimum required Python
version is 3.10 and it must have the ctypes module. A few Python
packages are also required to run Simics. These are
installed automatically when setting up a Simics project
(4), into a project local standard Python virtual
environment.
- Installing additional packages may be necessary.
- The Intel® Simics® SystemC* library has its own
compiler requirements, see the SystemC*
Library programming guide for details.
- The Microsoft Visual C++ compilers are only supported
for C++ modules.
- Setting up a project using
project-setup
and addon-manager does not require any extra Python packages.