New MSIM homepage is at d3s.mff.cuni.cz/software/msim.

Documentation can be found at msim.readthedocs.io while source code is at github.com/d-iii-s/msim.

Introduction MSIM

To develop an operating system from scratch is an invincible problem for most students – but starting at already finished base will never disclose them what the operating systems are about.

MSIM is a light-weight computer simulator based on MIPS R4000. It is used for education and research purposes, mainly to teach the construction and implementation of operating systems. MSIM is distributed with source code under the GNU GPL license to make possible modifications for users and works on most POSIX-compliance environments (mainly GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, but can be also compiled in Cygwin or MinGW in Windows). The user interface is simple terminal-style.

MSIM provides following features (along others):

• MIPS R4000 CPU
  • full memory management (TLB)
  • multiprocessor support
  • the instruction set is restricted to 32 bits
  • CPU cache is not simulated
• simple debugging features (including disassembling, register content dump)
• several simple hardware devices
• various hardware-manipulating commands
• widely configurable memory mapping of devices
• script-like start-up configuration file

MSIM does not aim to be a speed-optimized real hardware simulator, but rather a fully deterministic simulator useful for kernel debugging. There are several other projects which aim speed-optimized simulation (e.g. GXemul), but they are more complex to use.

Contact

If you have any ideas for improvements, feel free to contact us. In the case you have found a bug, please let us know via email. Attach the configuration, binary images and a detailed description of the bug so we can reproduce it.

Download

• Reference Manual
• Tutorial
  work in progress
• Mainline branch
  official Bazaar development branch
• Stable 1.3 branch
  official Bazaar development branch