Ski IA-64 Simulator Reference Manual 1.0L

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Getting Started: A Ski Tutorial

 

 

 

 

In this chapter, you learn how to use Ski by executing a brief tutorial. At the end of the tutorial, you will learn where to look in this manual for detailed descriptions of Ski’s operation and commands. Introductory information on Ski is presented in Chapter 2, “Overview”.

1.1The Ski Simulator

Ski simulates the IA-64 architecture and also has limited support for simulating IA-32 programs. Ski runs on IA-32 Linux host systems. You can use Ski for many purposes, as described in Section 2.1, “Introduction”. One of the most common uses of Ski is to test an IA-64 program in a Linux environment, and in this chapter, you will learn how to use xski, the X Window System version of Ski, by “walking through” a sample session, in about ten minutes. Ok, twenty minutes.

You should already be familiar with the IA-64 architecture and the C programming language, have xski installed on your Linux system, and have the XSki file in your home directory or in your X Window System app-defaults directory, typically /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults. You will also need to have an executable Linux IA-64 program such as the classic

“hello world” program.

1.2How to Run an IA-64 Application Program

Ski provides a Linux application environment in which an IA-64 program you provide can be simulated. The release notes provide the most up-to-date information on Ski’s support for the Linux Application Binary Interface (ABI). The following sections provide a short tutorial which leads you through an IA-64 program session with xski. You will learn how to use the most common Ski commands.

1.2.1Starting xski

As shown in Figure 1-1,start xski by typing its name to the Linux shell, just like any other Linux program, as shown in Figure 1-1.When running inside the IA-64 Linux Native User Environment (NUE), make sure that the environment variable DISPLAY is set to a string of the form hostname:display (e.g., ‘‘ myhost:0’’, values such as ‘‘ unix:0’’ or ‘‘ :0’’ won’t work) before invoking xski. If you have never run the simulator before, it will first prompt you to read and accept the software license it is distributed under. After accepting the license, the four primary xski windows will be displayed on your screen, as shown in Figure 1-2.No IA-64 program is loaded yet, so the Program Window and Data Window are empty. Scroll the various panes of the Register Window and note that with few exceptions, the registers are set to zero.

Copyright © 2000 Hewlett-Packard Co.

Getting Started: A Ski Tutorial

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