Sim G4 Users Guide V1.1.2

Sim_G4 v1.1.2 User’s Guide System Performance Modeling and Simulation Document 1998-007-0 Networking and Computing Systems Group Version 1.1.2 JR, KG 1 Overview The Sim_G4 performance model was developed specifically to model the Motorola G4 micropro- cessor. Its main purpose is to model the cycle-by-cycle timing of the processor using only an instruction trace file as input. By not modeling data flow, large gains in execution speed are achieved, allowing Sim_G4 to process millions of traced instructions quickly. 1.1 Scope The purpose of this document is to describe how to run the Sim_G4 model, and also how to cus- tomize its behavior through run time switches and parameters. Section 2 describes how to invoke the Sim_G4 simulator with supported command line options. Customization of Sim_G4 using runtime parameters is covered in Section 3. Section 4 describes how to invoke the trace utilities built into Sim_G4 through command line options. Using the Mac- intosh GUI for Sim_G4 is detailed in Section 5. The last section, Section 6, describes the input instruction trace expectation. Revised: 16 Mar 1999 1 Sim_G4 v1.1.2 User’s Guide 2 Running Sim_G4 2.1 Usage The Sim_G4 performance model’s executable is called “sim_g4”. Sim_G4 supports several com- mand line parameters. Sim_G4 expects as input a binary trace file in TT6 format (the TT6 format is described in the document “TT6 Trace Format” available from the System Performance Model- ing and Simulation group). Sim_G4 always reads its input from standard input (stdin). For exam- ple: % gunzip -c mytrace.tt6.gz | sim_g4 % sim_g4 < mytrace.tt6 As shown in the example above, the first line is a unix program gunzip is used to uncompress the gzip’ed file mytrace.tt6.gz. The output of the gunzip program becomes the input of sim_g4. In the second line, the input file mytrace.tt6 is used directly by sim_g4. Both of the above examples are valid invocations of Sim_G4. Although the simulator is highly customizable through command line options (Section 2.2 "Command Line Options") and runtime parameters (Section 3 "Customizing Sim_G4 using Runtime Parameters"), it can still be run with- out any options. By default, Sim_G4 outputs the statistical report when no options are selected. More detailed out- put can be generated by the use of command line options, discussed in the next section. 2.2 Command Line Options Command line options control the behavior of the output from Sim_G4. To change the configura- tion of the processor being simulated, one can use runtime parameters found in Section 3 "Cus- tomizing Sim_G4 using Runtime Parameters". Below is a listing of all command line parameters. Arguments for paramet…