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3   Installing Simics

Simics is provided as one or several tar archive files, for example simics-pkg-00-3.0.0-linux.tar where 00 is a customer specific package number, and 3.0.0 is the Simics version number. It is recommended that Simics is installed by root in a read-only location, such as /opt/virtutech/. Once Simics is installed, each user can create a Simics workspace as described in section 4.

Installing a Simics Package

  1. Download the appropriate Simics packages from the download site. (The download URL and package numbers are distributed separately).

  2. Unpack all package files by running tar. 
    $ tar xf simics-pkg-00-3.0.0-linux.tar
    This will create a temporary installation directory called simics-3.0-install. One Simics base package and several add-on packages can be installed at the same time, by unpacking them with tar before continuing with the next step, running the install script. It is possible to install multiple base packages of the same package type, where only the host type differs, at the same time.

  3. Change to the temporary installation directory and run the install script. 
    $ su
Password:
# cd simics-3.0-install
# sh install-simics.sh

  4. The install script will search the current directory for packages to install and ask for an alternative directory to install Simics in instead of the default one. It will also ask for the decryption key for each package. If packages have been unpacked earlier with the same package number and the same Simics version number, then the decode key has been cached in $HOME/.simics-tfkeys.

    5. Note: It is not possible to install several Simics base packages in the same directory.

  5. When the install script finishes, Simics has been installed in /opt/virtutech/simics-<version>/. This path is referred to as [simics] in all Simics documentation. The /opt/virtutech/ path may differ if an alternative installation directory was specified when the install script was run.

  6. The temporary installation directory may be removed when Simics has been successfully installed.

Installing the License

If you have a node-locked license file, simply copy it to the [simics]/licenses/ directory. To install floating licenses, refer to section 5.

Note: Once FLEXlm has successfully checked out a license it will add the path to the license search path (if it is not already present) in the .flexlmrc file in the user's home directory. If it takes a long time when Simics checks out the license, check this file for old incorrect paths to remove.

Installing Disk Images

A disk image, also called disk dump represents the contents of a hard disk, usually in a compressed form. Since images can be quite big, they are not provided in the standard Simics packages, but have to be downloaded separately. Publicly available image files can be downloaded from the Simics web site, https://www.simics.net/.

3.0.1   Single User Environment

In single user environments it is usually easiest to keep image files in the corresponding [workspace]/targets/<architecture>/ directory. Simics will automatically look for files in this directory, and images do not have to be moved when Simics is upgraded.

3.0.2   Multi User Environment

To allow several users to share the same image files, it is recommended that images are placed in a shared directory in the file-system, for example in /opt/virtutech/images/. After installing Simics, a reference to this directory should be added in the installation wide startup file [simics]/config/startup-commands: 
add-directory /opt/virtutech/images/

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