MARSS-x86 : Micro-Architecture & System Simulator for x86

Copyright 2010 Avadh Patel (apatel @ cs.binghamton.edu)

Marss-x86 is a simulation tool for x86-64 based Computing Systems. It is based on two independent open-source projects QEMU (http://www.qemu.org/) and PTLsim (http://www.ptlsim.org/). Marss-x86 is developed at Computer Architecture Group of SUNY Binghamton by Avadh Patel and other group Members.

You can find out more details about Marss go to (http://www.marss86.org/).

System Requirements

To compile Marss on your system, you will need following:

• 2.5GHz CPU with minimum 2GB RAM (4GB Preferred)
• Standard C++ compiler, like g++ or icc
• SCons tool for compiling Marss (Minimum version 1.2.0)
• SDL Development Libraries (Required for QEMU)

Compiling

If you don't have SCons install, install it using your stanard application installation program like apt-get or yum.

Once you have SCons install go to Marss directory and give following command:

$ scons -Q 

Default compile disables debugging and logging functionalities, to compile with logging functions enable give following command:

$ scons -Q debug=1

Default compile process compile simulator for single-core configuration. To compile Marss for Multi-Core SMP configuration give following command:

$ scons -Q c=[num_cores]

To clean your compilation:

$ scons -Q -c

Running

After successfull compilation, to run Marss you have to be in the root of Marss source directory. Then give the following command:

$ qemu/qemu-system-x86_64 -m [memory_size] [path-to-qemu-disk-image]

You can use all the regular QEMU command here, like start VM window in VNC give 'vnc :10' etc. Once the system is booted, you can switch to Monitor mode using 'Ctrl-Alt-2' key and give following command to switch to simulation mode:

(qemu) simconfig -run -stopinsns 100m -stats [stats-file-name]

You can also save simulation configuration parameters into a config file and pass that as argument when you start qemu with '-simconfig' option.

$ qemu/qemu-system-x86_64 -m [memory_size] [path-to-qemu-disk-image] -simconfig [simulator-config-file]

To get the list of available simulation options give following command:

(qemu) simconfig

It will print all the simulation options on STDOUT.

For more information on using and modifying Marss please visit our website : http://www.marss86.org/

Happy Hacking.