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.\" This is the man page for GXemul. Process this file with
.\"
.\"     groff -man -Tascii gxemul.1    or    nroff -man gxemul.1
.\"
.Dd MARCH 2021
.Dt GXEMUL 1
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm gxemul
.Nd an experimental framework for full-system machine emulation
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op machine, other, and general options
.Op file Ar ...
.Nm
.Op general options
.Ar @configfile
.Nm
.Fl H
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm
is a framework for full-system computer architecture emulation.
Several processor architectures and machine types have been implemented.
It is working well enough to allow unmodified "guest" operating
systems (e.g. NetBSD) to run inside the emulator, as if they were running 
on real hardware.
.Pp
The emulator emulates (networks of) real machines. The machines may consist
of ARM, MIPS, Motorola 88K, PowerPC, and SuperH processors, and various
surrounding hardware components such as framebuffers, busses, interrupt
controllers, ethernet controllers, disk controllers, and serial port
controllers.
.Sh RUNNING GUEST OPERATING SYSTEMS
Please read the HTML documentation for more details on how to run specific
guest operating systems in the emulator.
.Sh RUNNING THE EMULATOR
The emulator can be invoked in the following ways:
.Pp
1. When emulating a complete machine, configuration options can be
supplied directly on the command line.
.Pp
2. Options can be read from a configuration file.
.Pp
The easiest way to use the emulator is to supply settings directly on the 
command line.
.Pp
The most important thing you need to supply is the
file argument. This is the name of a binary file (an ELF, a.out, COFF/ECOFF,
SREC, or a raw binary image) which you wish to run in the emulator. This file
might be an operating system kernel, or perhaps a ROM image file.
If more than one filename is supplied, all files are loaded into memory, 
and the entry point (if available) is taken from the last file.
.Pp
Apart from the name of a binary file, you must also use the
.Fl E
and/or
.Fl e
options to select which emulation mode to use. This is necessary because
the emulator cannot in general deduce this from the file being executed.
For example, a MIPS-based machine from DEC (a DECstation) is very different
from a MIPS-based machine from SGI. Use
.Nm
.Fl H
to get a list of available emulation modes.
.Pp
There are three exceptions to the normal invocation usage mentioned above.
.Pp
1. For DECstation emulation, if you have a bootable DECstation harddisk or
CDROM image, then just supplying the diskimage via the
.Fl d
option is sufficient. The filename of the kernel can then be 
skipped, as the emulator runs the bootblocks from the diskimage directly and 
doesn't need the kernel as a separate file.
.Pp
2. If you supply an ISO9660 CDROM disk image, then using the
.Fl j
option to indicate a file on the CDROM filesystem to load is sufficient;
no additional kernel filename needs to be supplied on the command line.
.Pp
3. For Dreamcast emulation, when booting e.g. a NetBSD/dreamcast CDROM 
image, it is enough to supply the disk image (with the correct ISO 
partition start offset). Bootblocks will be read directly from the CDROM
image, and there is no need to supply the name of an external kernel on 
the command line.
.Pp
Gzipped kernels are automatically unzipped, by calling the external gunzip 
program, both when specifying a gzipped file directly on the command line 
and when loading such a file using the
.Fl j
option.
.Pp
Machine selection options:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Fl E Ar t
Try to emulate machine type
.Ar "t".
This option is not always needed, if the
.Fl e
option uniquely selects a machine.
(Use
.Fl H
to get a list of types.)
.It Fl e Ar st
Try to emulate machine subtype
.Ar "st".
Use this together with
.Fl E .
(This option is not always needed, if a machine type has no subtypes.)
.El
.Pp
Other options:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Fl C Ar x
Try to emulate a specific CPU type,
.Ar "x".
This overrides the default CPU type for the machine being emulated.
(Use
.Fl H
to get a list of available CPU types.)
.It Fl d Ar [modifiers:]filename
Add
.Ar filename
as a disk image. By adding one or more modifier characters and then a
colon (":") as a prefix to
.Ar filename,
you can modify the way the disk image is treated. Available modifiers are:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It b
Specifies that this is a boot device.
.It c
CD-ROM.
.It d
DISK (this is the default).
.It f
FLOPPY.
.It gH;S;
Override the default geometry; use H heads and S sectors-per-track.
(The number of cylinders is calculated automatically.)
.It i
IDE.
.It oOFS;
Set the base offset for an ISO9660 filesystem on a disk image. The default 
is 0. A suitable offset when booting from Dreamcast ISO9660 filesystem 
images, which are offset by 11702 sectors, is 23965696.
.It r
Read-only (don't allow changes to be written to the file).
.It R
Don't allow changes to the file, but add a temporary overlay for the
disk image to allow guest operating systems to write to the disk.
(These changes are lost when the GXemul process exits.)
.It s
SCSI.
.It t
Tape.
.It V
Add an overlay filename to an already defined disk image.
(A ID number must also be specified when this flag is used. See the 
documentation for an example of how to use overlays.)
.It 0-7
Force a specific ID number.
.El
.Pp
For SCSI devices, the ID number is the SCSI ID. For IDE harddisks, the ID 
number has the following meaning:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It 0
Primary master.
.It 1
Primary slave.
.It 2
Secondary master.
.It 3
Secondary slave.
.El
.Pp
Unless otherwise specified, filenames ending with ".iso" or ".cdr" are 
assumed to be CDROM images. Most others are assumed to be disks. Depending
on which machine is being emulated, the default for disks can be either 
SCSI or IDE. Some disk images that are very small are assumed to be floppy 
disks. (If you are not happy with the way a disk image is detected, then 
you need to use explicit prefixes to force a specific type.)
.Pp
For floppies, the gH;S; prefix is ignored. Instead, the number of 
heads and cylinders are assumed to be 2 and 80, respectively, and the 
number of sectors per track is calculated automatically. (This works for 
720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB, and 2.88MB floppies.)
.It Fl I Ar hz
Set the main CPU's frequency to
.Ar hz
Hz. This option does not work for all emulated machine modes. It affects 
the way count/compare interrupts are faked to simulate emulated time = 
real world time. If the guest operating system relies on RTC interrupts
instead of count/compare interrupts, then this option has no effect.
.Pp
Setting the frequency to zero disables automatic synchronization of 
emulated time vs real world time, and the count/compare system runs at a 
fixed rate.
.It Fl i
Enable instruction trace, i.e. display disassembly of each instruction as
it is being executed.
.It Fl J
Disable instruction combinations in the dynamic translator.
.It Fl j Ar n
Set the name of the kernel to
.Ar "n".
When booting from an ISO9660 filesystem, the emulator will try to boot 
using this file. (In some emulation modes, eg. DECstation, this name is passed 
along to the boot program. Useful names are "bsd" for OpenBSD/pmax, 
"vmunix" for Ultrix, or "vmsprite" for Sprite.)
.It Fl L Ar tapdev
Enable tap networking using device 'tapdev', on systems that support it.
.It Fl M Ar m
Emulate
.Ar m
MBs of physical RAM. This overrides the default amount of RAM for the 
selected machine type.
.It Fl N
Display the number of executed instructions per second on average, at
regular intervals.
.It Fl n Ar nr
Set the number of processors in the machine, for SMP experiments.
.Pp
Note 1: The emulator allocates quite a lot of virtual memory for
per-CPU translation tables. On 64-bit hosts, this is normally not a
problem. On 32-bit hosts, this can use up all available virtual userspace
memory. The solution is to either run the emulator on a 64-bit host,
or limit the number of emulated CPUs to a reasonably low number.
.Pp
Note 2: SMP simulation is not working very well yet; multiple processors 
are simulated, but synchronization between the processors does not map
very well to how real-world SMP systems work.
.It Fl O
Force a "netboot" (tftp instead of disk), even when a disk image is
present (for DECstation, SGI, and ARC emulation).
.It Fl o Ar arg
Set the boot argument (mostly useful for DEC, ARC, or SGI emulation).
Default
.Ar arg
for DEC is "\-a", for ARC/SGI it is "\-aN", and for CATS it is "\-A".
.It Fl p Ar pc
Add a breakpoint.
.Ar pc
can be a symbol, or a numeric value. (Remember to use the "0x" prefix for
hexadecimal values.)
.It Fl Q
Disable the built-in (software-only) PROM emulation. This option is useful
for experimenting with running raw ROM images from real machines. The default 
behaviour of the emulator is to "fake" certain PROM calls used by guest 
operating systems (e.g. NetBSD), so that no real PROM image is needed.
.It Fl R
Use a random bootstrap cpu, instead of CPU nr 0. (This option is only 
meaningful together with the
.Fl n
option.)
.It Fl r
Dump register contents for every executed instruction.
.It Fl S
Initialize emulated RAM to random data, instead of zeroes. This option
is useful when trying to trigger bugs in a program that occur because the
program assumed that uninitialized memory contains zeros. (Use with
care.)
.It Fl s Ar flags:filename
Gather statistics based on the current emulated program counter value, 
while the program executes. The statistics is actually just a raw dump of 
all program counter values in sequence, suitable for post-analysis with 
separate tools. Output is appended to
.Ar filename.
.Pp
The
.Ar flags
should include one or more of the following type specifiers:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It v
Virtual. This means that the program counter value is used.
.It p
Physical. This means that the physical address of where the program
is actually running is used.
.It i
Instruction call. This type of statistics gathering is practically only 
useful during development of the emulator itself. The output is a list of
addresses of instruction call functions (ic->f), which after some
post-processing can be used as a basis for deciding when to implement
instruction combinations.
.El
.Pp
The
.Ar flags
may also include the following optional modifiers:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It d
Disabled at startup.
.It o
Overwrite the file, instead of appending to it.
.El
.Pp
Statistics gathering can be enabled/disabled at runtime by using the
"statistics_enabled = yes" and "statistics_enabled = no" debugger 
commands.
.Pp
When gathering instruction statistics using the
.Fl s
option, instruction combinations are always disabled (i.e. an implicit
.Fl J
flag is added to the command line).
.It Fl T
Halt if the emulated program attempts to access non-existing memory.
.It Fl t
Show a trace tree of all function calls being made.
.It Fl X
Use X11. This option enables graphical framebuffers.
.It Fl Y Ar n
Scale down framebuffer windows by
.Ar n
x
.Ar n
times. This option is useful when emulating a very large framebuffer, and 
the actual display is of lower resolution. If
.Ar n
is negative, then there will be no scaledown, but emulation of certain 
graphic controllers will be scaled up
by
.Ar -n
times instead. E.g. Using
.Ar -2
with VGA text mode emulation will result in 80x25 character cells rendered 
in a 1280x800 window, instead of the normal resolution of 640x400.
.It Fl Z Ar n
Set the number of graphics cards, for emulating a dual-head or tripple-head
environment. (Only for DECstation emulation so far.)
.It Fl z Ar disp
Add
.Ar disp
as an X11 display to use for framebuffers.
.El
.Pp
General options:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Fl A
Disable colorized output.
.It Fl c Ar cmd
Add
.Ar cmd
as a command to run before starting the simulation. A similar effect can 
be achieved by using the
.Fl V
option, and entering the commands manually.
.It Fl D
Causes the emulator to skip a call to srandom(). This leads to somewhat
more deterministic behaviour than running without this option.
However, if the emulated machine has clocks or timer interrupt sources,
or if user interaction is taking place (e.g. keyboard input at irregular
intervals), then this option is meaningless.
.It Fl G
Enable colorized output. If the environment variable CLICOLOR is set, then
this is the default behavior.
.It Fl H
Display a list of available CPU types and machine types.
(Most of these don't work. Please read the HTML documentation included in the
.Nm
distribution for details on which modes that actually work.)
.It Fl h
Display a list of all available command line options.
.It Fl k Ar n
Set the size of the dyntrans cache (per emulated CPU) to
.Ar n
MB. The default size is 96 MB.
.It Fl K
Show the debugger prompt instead of exiting, when a simulation ends.
.It Fl q
Quiet mode; this suppresses startup messages.
.It Fl V
Start up in the interactive debugger, paused. If this option is used,
.Fl q
is ignored. This option also sets
.Fl K.
.It Fl v
Increase verbosity (show more debug messages). This option can be used
multiple times.
.It Fl x
Open up separate terminal windows for emulated serial ports. The default behaviour is to 
open up new terminals when using configuration files with more than one machine
specified, or if X11 is enabled. When starting up a simple emulation
session with settings directly on the command line (or when using configuration
files with a single machine specification), and neither
.Fl X
nor
.Fl x
is used, then all output is confined to the terminal that
.Nm
started in.
The default terminal to use is 'xterm', but this can be overriden by
the XTERM environment variable.
.El
.Pp
Configuration file startup:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It @ Ar configfile
Start an emulation based on the contents of
.Ar "configfile".
.El
.Sh EXAMPLES
The following command will start NetBSD/pmax on an emulated DECstation 
5000/200 (3MAX):
.Pp
.Dl "gxemul -e 3max -d nbsd_pmax.img"
.Pp
nbsd_pmax.img should be a raw disk image containing a bootable 
NetBSD/pmax filesystem.
.Pp
The following command will start an emulation session based on settings in 
the configuration file "mysession". The \-v option tells gxemul to be
verbose.
.Pp
.Dl "gxemul -v @mysession"
.Pp
If you have compiled the small Hello World program mentioned in the
.Nm
documentation, the following command will start up an
emulated test machine in "paused" mode:
.Pp
.Dl "gxemul -E testmips -V hello_mips"
.Pp
Paused mode means that you enter the interactive single-step debugger
directly at startup, instead of launching the Hello World program.
.Pp
The paused mode is also what should be used when running "unknown" files 
for the first time in the emulator. E.g. if you have a binary which you 
think is some kind of MIPS ROM image, then you can try the following:
.Pp
.Dl "gxemul -vv -E baremips -V 0xbfc00000:image.raw"
.Pp
You can then use the single-stepping functionality of the built-in 
debugger to run the code in the ROM image, to see how it behaves. Based on 
that, you can deduce what machine type it was actually from (the 
baremips machine is not a real machine), and perhaps try again with 
another emulation mode.
.Pp
In general, however, real ROM images require much more emulation detail 
than GXemul provides, so they can usually not run.
.Sh BUGS
There are many bugs. Some of the known bugs are mentioned in the TODO 
file in the
.Nm
source distribution, some are marked as TODO in the source code itself.
.Pp
.Nm
is in general not cycle-accurate; it does not simulate individual
pipe-line stages or penalties caused by branch-prediction misses or
cache misses, so it cannot be used for accurate simulation of any actual
real-world processor.
.Pp
.Nm
is in general not timing-accurate. Many emulation modes try to make the
guest operating system's clock run at the same speed as the host clock.
However, the number of instructions executed per clock tick can
obviously vary, depending on the current CPU load on the host.
.Pp
.Nm
is in general not guaranteed to be secure; when used as a virtual machine
to run untrusted code in the form of a guest OS, the untrusted code may
be able to crash the emulator, or due to bugs, take over the host.
.Sh AUTHOR
GXemul is Copyright (C) 2003-2021  Anders Gavare <gavare@gmail.com>
.Pp
See http://gavare.se/gxemul/ for more information. For other Copyright
messages, see the corresponding parts of the source code and/or
documentation.