ski

This project provides ski, an ia64 instruction set simulator. Ski was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard and has been relicensed under the GNU Public License v2.

Synopsis

• ski -- the ncurses-based version of the ia64 instruction set simulator, able to run ia64 executables on non-ia64 architectures, and examine their run-state in detail.
• bski -- the "batch" version of ski; i.e., without an interface, to be used as an interpreter for directly executing ia64 programs.
• xski -- ski, but with a Motif-based X Windows interface.

Description

Ski is an IA-64 instruction set simulator, originally written by the Hewlett-Packard Company. It simulates the IA-64 architecture as defined by the Intel Itanium 2 architecture manuals. This is not a full platform simulator; i.e., no system chipset or PCI bus simulation is done. However, ski supports the full instruction set of the architecture, including privileged instructions and associated semantics.

Ski can be used in two operating mode: user- and system-mode. In user mode, you can run user level applications directly on top of the simulator. The emulation stops at the system call boundary. The system call is emulated by calling the host OS, such as x86 Linux. Conversions between 64-bit and 32-bit parameters are done by ski as needed. This allows fast execution of user programs. Most system calls are emulated, though the emulation is not always 100 percent accurate.

In system-mode, operating-system kernel development and execution is possible because interrupts and virtual memory behaviors are simulated. In this mode you can actually run the Linux kernel and, once booted, user applications can be run on top of the simulated kernel.

The ski simulator comes with three different interfaces. The simplest one is the batch mode, called bski. In this mode the simulator runs in non-interactive mode, very much like a shell running a script.

There is also a full-text curses-based mode, where you can interact with the simulator to inspect code, set breakpoints, and so on. This version is called ski.

Finally there is a graphical version called xski which gives you several windows where you can look at the code, inspect register contents, etc.

All three modes provides the same core simulation, only the interface is different.

Download

Ski is available from Sourceforge:

• The project home page (this one) can be found at: http://ski.sourceforge.net.
• The SourceForge project page can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ski.

From source

The source can be found in the files section of the ski project: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=201975.

Once downloaded, the standard steps of ./configure, make, make install will build ski (see also Dependencies).

From the repository

Ski uses Mercurial for its source code control system. You can browse the current development tree at http://ski.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/ski/. Note that all available Mercurial repositories for this project (including older versions) may be found at http://ski.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi.

Mercurial users can clone the complete tree with hg clone http://ski.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/ski

Dependencies

ski requires a fairly reasonable GNU toolchain to get it running. As of this writing, it is known to build and work with GCC 4.1. Ski needs the following tools to build:

• autoconf
• autogen
• automake -- use at least 1.9
• libtool
• bison
• flex
• gawk
• gperf
• lesstiff development libraries
• libltld3 development libraries
• libelf development libraries
• ncurses development libraries
• and probably something else that's been overlooked...

Support

There is currently one mailing list for ski:

ski-devel

All current traffic occurs on this list. The need for other lists will be contemplated when necessary. You can subscribe at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ski-devel

Reporting bugs

Before reporting bugs, please read the FAQs section.

For any bugs found, report them using to project bugs page for ski at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=201975.

Please include enough info that the bug can be easily recreated.

FAQs

TBD?

To Be Determined...

Plans

• Glue the test suite back together
• aclocal-1.10 is called out explicitly in autogen.sh, but automake 1.9 is used elswhere?
• Are all of the bugs cleaned up?
• The X version seems to have suffered from major bit-rot, likely related to using Motif, instead of something out of this century. All votes seem to be for just removing the X version completely -- which has been done in such a way it can be turned back on later:
  • the build no longer requires X11 to build -- xski is no longer created by default.
  • see configure.ac for notes on how to re-enable xski when someone is ready to port it to something other than Motif.
• check BitfR usage (replace everything w/ BitfX and fix the errors...)
• think about making the trcread program available
• /etc/init.d/ia64fmt may need to do "modprobe binfmt_misc" before trying to register the simlator; at least, this seems to be necessary on RH7.2; in Debian, use update-binfmt, instead
• make sure latest instruction set (SDM2.2) is supported
• redo the documentation
• add some HOWTOs (e.g., HOWTO use ski with xen)
• integrate into qemu somehow?
• graft ski and gdb together?

Author

Of the web site, and current upstream maintainer: Al Stone (ahs3 at users dot sf dot net)

To be clear, there are a lot of folks within HP that have contributed to ski over the years. To all of them (you know who you are), a Big Thank You.

Acknowledgements

• Anyone who has sent (or will send) patches, translations, bugs and feedback.
• The creators of and contributors to ski within HP.
• A Really Big Thank You to Hewlett-Packard and their Linux and Open Source Organization for allowing ski to be released under the GPL. You can see other such projects from HP at their Open Source web site http://opensource.hp.com.

Last updated: 12 August 2007