AMD Confidential
User Manual September 12th, 2008
Chapter 2: Installation 3
2 Installation

2.1 System Requirements

The AMD SimNow™ simulator runs on both Linux 64 for AMD systems and
Windows® for 64-bit AMD systems.
The requirements for each system are as follows:
Linux 64 for AMD64
OS Distribution
Any of the following 64- Bit
Linux distributions for AMD64.
SuSE 9 Pro and newer
RedHat 64Bit Enterprise 3
and above
Fedora Core 2 and newer.
Recommended
SuSE 9.1 or newer for AMD64.
Memory
Approx. 64MB of memory, plus
Approx. 150 MB of memory for each simulated processor, plus the
amount of simulated RAM.
Processor
AMD Athlon™ 64 or AMD Opteron™.
Hard Disk Space
1 Gigabyte of free hard disk space for the simulator and devices
plus 3 Gigabytes free space for disk file images.
Other Hardware
3.5-inch, 1.44-MB floppy drive.
CD-ROM Drive.
Table 2-1: Software and Hardware Requirements
Running the simulator on a Linux kernel prior to version 2.6.10 may cause the simulator
to malfunction. The bug is in the 64-bit path only, and the symptom is in signals that are
not associated with "system calls" still being treated as "system calls" as they go back to
user space, i.e. in certain cases it tries to restart the "system call" even when it did not
come from a "system call". Updating the Linux kernel to kernel version 2.6.10 or later
resolves this problem.
The simulator may stress the system more than most applications, including the base
operating system. AMD has received reports that the simulator has caused some systems
to crash, and in general this has been traced to unstable hardware. Hardware instability
can also crash applications or operating systems inside the simulator.

2.2 Installation Procedure

Insert the CD-ROM into your s ystem's CD-ROM drive, or download the simulator
program and its data files from http://developer.amd.com/simnow.aspx. Browse to the
root directory of the CD or to the path where the downloaded simulator is stored, and