hcindyl/mpact-sim

MPACT-Sim - Retargetable Instruction Set Simulator Infrastructure

MPACT-Sim is a toolkit that reduces the effort to create instruction set simulators, and make the resulting simulators easy to change and extend.

This repository contains the C++ code for MPACT-Sim, tools and library support for making it simple to create easily retargetable simulators for a wide range of instruction set architectures.

The toolkit consists of three major components. The first is the isa and binary decoder generators, that take in descriptors of the isa and the binary encoding of instructions and produce C++ code used in writing a decoder. The second is the generic classes that implement the instruction objects, registers, and other simulated state objects, and the code necessary to manipulate them, as well as supporting writing the semantics of the instructions. Lastly, there are utility classes that make it easier to put together a finished simulator, including memory classes and an ELF loader.

Building

MPACT-Sim utilizes the bazel build system.

Directory Listing

• mpact/sim/decoder
  This directory contains the code that implements the tools that parse .isa and .bin_fmt files, which define the instructions and instruction encodings of an ISA, and generate C++ code for the instruction decoder for an MPACT-Sim simulator.

  The tools are built automatically and the process is largly invisible when using bazel with the appropriate build targets - see the tests in mpact/sim/decoder/test for examples.

• mpact/sim/generic
  This directory contains alll the generic classes provided for use in writing MPACT-Sim instruction set simulators.

• mpact/sim/util
  This directory contains code for a generic ELF program loader, and for a set of classes that can be used to implement memories used in an instruction set simulator.