Previous - Up - Next

3   Installing Simics

Simics is provided as a tar archive file called simics-pal-3.0.0-linux.tar where 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, a Simics workspace can be setup, as described in section 4.

Although Simics for PAL (Personal Academic License) users is a single user product, it is recommended that the workspace with user files is kept separate from the base Simics installation.

Installing a Simics Package

  1. Download the Simics package from the download site.

  2. Unpack the Simics package by running tar. 
    $ tar xf simics-pal-3.0.0-linux.tar
    This will create a temporary installation directory called simics-3.0-install.

  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.

  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

Copy the license file, that you should have received by email, to [simics]/licenses: 

# cp simics-license-hostid.lic /opt/virtutech/simics-<version>/licenses/

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/

Previous - Up - Next