This document provides an introduction to the Simics product and some of its features. 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 modeling tools, scripting, and a rich set of other features. Unlike many other virtual machine products, Simics 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. These tutorials are based on the command line version of Simics.
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 directory where the Simics Base package or any add-on package is installed is referred to as [simics], for example when mentioning the [simics]/RELEASENOTES.html file. In the same way, the shortcut [project] is used to point at the user's project directory.
The character "/" is used to separate directories and files, for Linux. If you are using Windows, you should read the character as "\" instead.
This section presents the terminology used throughout Simics documentation.
The computer that Simics is running on is called the Simics host. When the documentation, tutorials, and training materials say "host" or "host machine", it means the physical computer running the Simics process.
The hardware that Simics simulates is called the Simics target machine, or the target system.
Target machines, their settings, etc., are altogether called a Simics configuration. Usually they are loaded from .simics and .include scripts, but manual tweaks may add to the configuration.
One Simics simulation can contain multiple target machines, for example when Simics is simulating a network.
For interaction with the target system, Simics can present both target graphics consoles and target serial consoles.