As a customer you should have received instructions that describes which packages to install and where to find them. If this is not the case, contact your provider to obtain this information.
For the installation, use the Intel® Simics® Package Manager (ISPM). ISPM can be used to check for updated packages, download and install/uninstall, and manage Intel Simics Projects, also called "user projects". It supports both command line (batch) mode and GUI mode.
The simulator is delivered in packages, each one containing different parts of the functionality. There is a Simics Base package and several add-on packages. The most common packages are:
Once ISPM has installed Simics Base and one or more platform packages it can create user projects. A user project is a directory for adding user files and developing simulation models, and is typically set up for a combination of a few packages of certain versions. Thus such projects enable users to work with different package combinations just by switching between projects.
New users are suggested to study the Getting Started guide which describes how to launch the simulator and run the QSP-x86 platform.
ISPM can, at any time, install more packages, other versions of already installed packages, or uninstall packages or versions no longer used.
VMP uses direct execution to simulate x86 systems at near native speed. A kernel module is needed to communicate directly with the host hardware, and installing the kernel module requires a separate step.
The VMP feature requires that the host machine running the simulator has the Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for IA-32, Intel® 64, and that Intel® Architecture (Intel® VT-x) is enabled in the host machine firmware (the UEFI/BIOS) and visible to the VMXMON kernel module.
For more information and known limitations, see Simics User's Guide, chapter "Simulation Performance".
Installing and managing VMP kernel modules requires sudo privileges. Installing will compile the kernel module and therefore also requires an environment to build kernel modules. Which packages you need for building kernel modules depend on the distribution of Linux that you are using, but at least for certain Red Hat based distributions you would need gcc-c++, kernel-headers, and kernel-devel. Change directory to the user project and run:
[project]$ bin/vmp-kernel-install
The script will compile and persistently install the kernel modules that are used by VMP. It will echo what needs to be done, which involves running scripts in the [simics]/vmxmon/scripts/ directory.
Disable VMP temporarily by running the bin/vmp-kernel-unload script, and enable VMP with the bin/vmp-kernel-load script. Permanently uninstall VMP from your host by running the bin/vmp-kernel-uninstall script.
If the installation is read-only, or if you for some other reason want to have the built VMP artifacts outside of the installation, you can give a directory to the relevant VMP scripts, for example:
[project]$ bin/vmp-kernel-install /somewhere/directory
[project]$ bin/vmp-kernel-load /somewhere/directory
The kernel module can be loaded and unloaded by running the bin\vmp-kernel-load.bat respective bin\vmp-kernel-unload.bat scripts as administrator. To do that, open a command shell as administrator and run:
[project]> bin\vmp-kernel-load.bat
Another way to perform the same action would be to right-click on vmp-kernel-load.bat and select run as administrator.
The /AUTO and /DEMAND options select the start option for the VMP service. With /AUTO (default), the service will be available after restart whereas with /DEMAND makes the service available just until shutdown or reboot, and then VMP has to be loaded again when needed.
If the script fails, see the Windows event log for more information. The most common reason is that Intel® VT-x technology or the NX feature is not enabled in the UEFI/BIOS. The kernel module will also fail to load if the Hyper-V feature is enabled.