[vmips] VMIPS 1.2 Released

[Brian R. Gaeke]

   VMIPS 1.2 has been released. VMIPS is a MIPS R3000 virtual machine
simulator with support for a serial console and GNU cross-compiler tools.

   VMIPS 1.2 is a new release with several new features, a few bug fixes,
and many documentation and configuration updates.  It should be much easier
to build and repackage VMIPS 1.2 than previous releases, because a MIPS
cross-compiler tool chain is no longer required to build VMIPS.

   You can download VMIPS 1.2 from any of the following sites:

* ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/sourceforge/vmips/
* ftp://ftp.dgate.org/vmips/releases/vmips-1.2/
* http://download.sourceforge.net/vmips/
* http://www.dgate.org/vmips/releases/vmips-1.2/
* http://vmips.sourceforge.net/releases/vmips-1.2/

   VMIPS is free software available under the GNU General Public
License; for details, please read the file "COPYING". For installation
instructions, please read "INSTALL". VMIPS was built by Brian Gaeke and
others; for details, please see the files "AUTHORS" and "THANKS". New
features since the last publically released version are detailed in
"NEWS".

   The home page for VMIPS is "http://www.dgate.org/vmips". For bug
reporting instructions, please see the VMIPS Manual.

   User-visible changes in version 1.2 (since version 1.1.3):

   * Many documentation updates have been made. Note that the
     documentation has been relicensed under the MIT license, instead
     of the GNU FDL.

   * Many facets of VMIPS are now configurable at runtime, instead of at
     compile time. For instance:

        It is now possible to build and install VMIPS without having
     previously installed MIPS cross-compiler tools. In particular,
     VMIPS now incorporates the portions of GNU libopcodes used to
     implement the MIPS disassembler, so linking against an installed
     version of libopcodes from GNU binutils is no longer necessary.

        It is now possible to switch the VMIPS CPU from big-endian to
     little-endian mode or vice-versa using a command-line option.

        It is now possible to change the name of the configuration file
     that VMIPS reads on startup using a command-line option. The "-o
     configfile" option, which never worked, has been removed.

   * vmipstool now shares command-line processing code with vmips. It
     also has a new -swap-words option that allows you to byteswap all
     the 4-byte words in a file.

   * You can now specify numeric constants in command line options which
     are multiples of 1024, 1024^2, or 1024^3 using the K, M, or G
     suffixes.

   * Several new emulated devices based on the DECstation 5000/200 have
     been added.  In particular, it is no longer possible to disable
     the serial device at compile time (or with `-o nousetty'), but you
     can choose whether to use the DECstation serial chip or the
     SPIM-compatible serial console (or neither) using new command-line
     options. In addition, the ROM program distributed with VMIPS
     supports a "boot environment" similar to that provided by the
     DECstation PROM. The new DECstation-compatible devices have not
     been comprehensively validated; they should be considered "beta"
     quality at this point.

   * There is a new tracing framework you can use to generate runtime
     execution traces of programs that run in VMIPS. See the
     documentation of the "tracing" command-line option and the other
     options that begin with "trace" for more details.

   * The VMIPS interface to GDB now supports the "remote Z-packet"
     interface for setting breakpoints.

   * VMIPS now prints more informative diagnostic messages about the
     causes of bus errors and interrupts.

   * You can now use ^C (your terminal's Interrupt key) to stop VMIPS
     and break into the debugger, if the `-o debug' command line option
     was set, or ^\ (your terminal's Quit key) to halt VMIPS in an
     orderly manner at any time.

   * The `--disable-debug' option to `configure' now strips the
     compiled VMIPS binaries, although it has been documented to do
     this for some time now.

   To get the code from CVS as any bug fixes are added, checkout from branch
"vmips-1_2-branch". VMIPS 1.2 itself can be checked out using the tag
"release-1-2".

   Please refer to the bug reporting instructions in the VMIPS manual
if you have trouble using the software.

-Brian Gaeke and the VMIPS developers <vmips at dgate.org>

-- 
Brian R. Gaeke, brg at dgate.org -- GnuPG encrypted mail gleefully accepted