VirtualMHz for ARM, Standard Edition (VM-arm SE)

VM-arm simulation features:

• Models Intel StrongARM SA-1100 and Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA.
• Supports 2 modes of simulation:
  
  • Interpreter - standard instruction-by-instruction simulation.
  • Translator - dynamic translation of ARM instructions into optimized native X86 sequences using the VirtualMHz Translation Engine.
• Very high performance: simulate ARM devices up to 200MHz clock frequency in real-time!
• Many built-in features to support debug of the simulated software.
• Can be used with GNU arm-elf and arm-linux software tool chains.
• Runs ARM bare-machine programs using a built-in monitor for host input/output.
• Runs ARM Linux kernels and distributions (configured for SA-1100). For example:
  
  • arm-linux-2.6.10 from www.kernel.org
  • OpenZaurus 3.5.3 from www.openzaurus.org

This release of VM-arm models many features of the Intel StrongARM SA-1100:

• ARM instruction set, little-endian operation only.
• Exceptions, aborts, interrupts.
• Co-processor 15 (memory management unit).
• Memory bus: interfaces to ROM, FLASH, SRAM and DRAM.
• System-on-a-chip features: memory controller, LCD controller, serial comms module, UART, 28 GPIO pins, real-time clock, interrupt controller, timers, serial ports.

The following features of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA platform are modeled:

• LCD screen: 320 x 240 x 8-bit color.
• Touch screen: emulated by clicking on the LCD window with the mouse.
• Keyboard and other buttons.
• A serial port can be connected to the terminal window in which the simulator is run.
• A serial port can be connected to the host's network using PPP networking.
  
• CompactFlash memory cards can be simulated with the contents mapped to a host file.
  
• 64MB of RAM and 32MB of ROM.

Performance data is given in the following table for a reference machine consisting of:

• Dell Dimension 4600 desk-top
• 2.666 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with 512 KB of L2 cache
• 1.5 GB of DDR memory
• Fedora Core 3 Linux, kernel 2.6.9-1.681_FC3

This is essentially a commodity desk-top PC, though it has a large amount of memory. A high-end machine will have a significantly higher clock speed and larger L2 cache, and could be as much as 50% faster than this reference machine.

Host Requirements:

• IBM PC compatible, Intel or AMD x86 processor with clock speed 1.0 GHz or higher
  
  • Intel Pentium 4 or Xeon
  • AMD Athlon, Athlon 64 or Opteron.
  • 512MB of RAM, 10MB of available hard disk space (in directory /opt).
• Operating system:
  
  • Tested Linux distributions: Debian 3.0, Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2, Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 9.2, Red Hat 9.0, SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 and SuSE Linux Professional 9.2.
  • Other recent Linux distributions may also work but are untested.
  • Microsoft Windows is not currently supported.