Ethernet Networking Technology Guide / 3 Network Simulation / 3.4 IP Services /

3.4.4 TFTP

The service node also supports the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP, see RFC 1350) which allows to transfer files between the host system (running the simulation) and a simulated (target) client. TFTP is often used during network booting, together with the BOOTP facilities, to load OS kernels and images, and it can also be used interactively with the tftp command found on many systems.

Files to be transferred from the host system to the simulated client should be placed in a directory in the Simics path. This is the standard path used by image objects: list-directories will print its current value, while add-directory will add a directory to the path list. The current working directory is also automatically included.

Files transferred from the simulated client to the host will end up in the current working directory. When running Simics in graphical mode, this will be the project directory; from the command line or without a project, it will be the directory Simics was started from.

Note: TFTP is based on UDP, and each packet is acknowledged individually before the transfer is allowed to continue. Depending on the latency of the link, the transfer of large files can be slow. In that case, ensuring that the link uses a lower latency will increase performance.

A short example, assuming the target machine is running Linux with TFTP installed, has already booted, and has a working service node properly connected. We bring up the target's network interface:

joe@computer: ~# ifconfig eth0 10.10.0.10 up

And we transfer the file myfile.txt from the host machine:

joe@computer: ~# tftp -l myfile.txt -r myfile.txt -g 10.10.0.1

3.4.3 DNS 3.4.5 NFS