ETISS (Extendable Translating Instruction Set Simulator)

ETISS is a C++ ISS (Instruction Set Simulator), which is designed to simulate instructions for a target core on a host computer. It translates binary instructions into C code and appends translated code into a block, which will be compiled and executed at runtime. As aforementioned, it is Extendable, thus it supports myriad level of customization by adopting the technique of plug-ins. ETISS supports varied Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) according to user needs (see architecture models in ArchImpl/). Meanwhile, the simulator could be enhanced with customized plug-ins to set up many applications (see application examples in examples/).

ETISS is structured as shown in the diagram above, and it is capable of translating binary instructions according to loaded architecture models. Furthermore, plug-ins could be developed to model new features of architecture and be added flexibly without any hacking in the ETISS source code.

Publication

If you use ETISS in your academic work you can cite it from this:

Publication

If you use ETISS in your academic work you can cite it from this:

Getting Started

The ETISS core and included plugins are built as libraries. To make use of the simulator, a program using the library is needed. A very simple bare-metal processor is included in this repository in src/bareetissprocessor. This program is built during the normal build process; its compiled binary will be placed under <build_-_dir>/bin and <etiss_install_dir>/bin. See its README for more details.

System Requirements

ETISS is built using C++ and verified to work on recent x86_64 Linux host systems. Windows hosts are currently only supported using WSL or similar virtualization methods.

Dependencies

• C++ 14 compliant compiler
• Boost >= 1.54 development headers, specifically the sub-libraries:
  • boost-system
  • boost-filesystem
  • boost-program-options
• CMake >= 3.13
• Optional:
  • Graphviz + Doxygen (For documentation generation)
  • LLVM + Clang 11 (Please download appropriate pre-built binaries from https://releases.llvm.org/download.html and put them in /opt/)

LINUX SYSTEM

Packages required for Ubuntu / Debian:

build-essential git cmake libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev

Build and Installation

Follow these instructions to quickly build ETISS. Start in the root directory of ETISS by creating a build directory:

$ mkdir build_dir

Change to the created directory, e.g.,

$ cd build_dir

If LLVM-JIT compiler is used, source it with the environment variable:

$ export LLVM_DIR=/path/to/llvm

Configure the build system, e.g., Replace `pwd`/installed with your <etiss_install_path> if you do not like to install etiss into build_dir/installed/. Set up path to cmake if necessary. Replace Release with Debug for development purposes.

$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`pwd`/installed ..

Compile the package:

$ make

Build the documentation (optional):

$ make doc

Install the package:

$ make install

To save time, compiling can be sped up by using multiple CPU cores:

$ make -j$(nproc)

WINDOWS SYSTEM

Running ETISS on Windows systems is currently only supported using WSL. The steps here are the same as for running on Linux.

Example project to run ETISS

Example programs tailored to run in ETISS can be found in the repository https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/etissriscvexamples. Follow the README there to get started.

Licensing and Copyright

See the separate LICENSE file to determine your rights and responsibilities for using ETISS.

User Documentation

The documentation is optionally built with ETISS and can be found in <etiss_install_path>/doc/html/index.html

It is also hosted at https://tum-ei-eda.github.io/etiss/