Simics GDB Release Notes

1 Introduction

This document identifies important information for the Simics GDB package for Simics 6. All users of this specific package should review this document carefully.

2 Changes Since Version 6.0.0

The following is a list of changes since the initial 6.0.0 release.

• 6.0.4 (build 6270)

  • GDB
    • The GDB version has been updated to 14.1.

• 6.0.2 (build 6231)

  • GDB
    • The package now contains a file third-party-programs.txt with a list of third party software included in the package.

• 6.0.1 (build 6226)

  • GDB
    • The GDB package now includes third-party source code.

• 6.0.0 (build 6216)

  • Common
    • Simics no longer comes with documentation in PDF format.
    • Documentation in HTML format has been added.
    • Fixed a problem on Windows where the installer still asked for the Model Builder key (bug #SIMINT-1236).
    • Support for Python 2.7 has been removed. Simics now only embeds a Python 3 interpreter.
    • The separation of source code into separate packages has been removed. Source code is now included directly into each package.
    • The installers for Linux and macOS have been updated. Support for fallback mode of decryption keys has been removed.
  • GDB
    • GDB is now distributed in a separate package, Simics GDB with package number 1031.
    • GDB now has basic support for DML 1.4 models and 1.4 syntax. Within GDB, performing DML casts, assignments, and little-endian bitslices are now supported, and indices are now implicitly provided to any method calls (bug #SIMICS-19386).
    • Fixed a bug where DML parameters referencing the device instance could not be accessed within GDB.
    • GDB now supports models compiled with --split-c-file.
    • GDB version is now 12.1 (bug #SIMICS-19351).
    • Fixed a problem on Linux, where the gdb binary was linked to the wrong version of libncurses.
    • Internal changes to GDB build structure.
    • Corrected error on Windows where it was not possible to call functions from GDB prompt.
    • Updated GDB to link dynamically and use python 3.7. Added copyrights for readline and ncurses.
    • The GDB distributed with Simics has been updated to version 8.3.
    • GDB can again correctly load and view information about DML devices with object arrays (bug #SIMICS-13278).

3 Changes in version 6

4 Limitations

This section briefly describes the known limitations of the Simics GDB package. Please refer to section 5 for a more technical description.

For model oriented packages, additional limitations may be found in the model target guides.

5 Detailed List of Limitations

This section describes in detail the known limitations of the Simics GDB package. Please refer to section 4 for a more general description.

A register or field marked as Not implemented is present with read-write semantics but has no side effects on simulation. A register marked as Not implemented (design limitation) has the same semantics as a "Not implemented" register and there is no plan to extend the model with this functionality. A register with Lack of documentation has not been implemented because there is no available documentation describing its semantics.