HP IA-64, Ski Simulator manual Summary of Program Execution Commands

Ski IA-64 Simulator Reference Manual 1.0L

6.6Program Execution

Programs may be run in their entirety without interruption, they may be stopped at appropriate places (see Section 8.3, “Program Breakpoints”) and continued, or they may be single-stepped for debugging purposes. The different program execution choices are described below.

You can stop a running simulation in ski at any time with your interrupt character (usually ^C). The interrupt will be hon- ored at the beginning of simulation of the next instruction. xski and bski do not have interrupt handlers; if you use your interrupt character while they are running, they will be terminated by the operating system.

6.6.1Summary of Program Execution Commands

run

Starts / restarts execution of a program at the current ip value. Generally used after a breakpoint is encountered.

cont

Same function as the run command. The mnemonic stands for “continue”.

step [count]

With no argument, executes a single instruction. If a count is specified, executes count instructions.

step until expression

Steps through your program until the specified expression has a non-zero value. Because the expression must be evaluated before each simulated instruction, you may notice a slowdown in Ski’s simulation speed. This command can be used to implement data write breakpoints, with the caveat that it won’t detect the case where the write doesn’t change the value. This can be useful when you are tracking down a memory corruption problem: you can use “ step until r33!=r32”, for example. Another example of this command is breaking into a loop after a certain number of iterations: “ step until r35<=30”. (See Section 4.4.1.2, “Expressions”.)

Copyright © 2000 Hewlett-Packard Co. Program Simulation 6-5