The vmips Project


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General Info About vmips

What's vmips?

vmips is a virtual machine simulator based around a MIPS R3000 RISC CPU core. It is an open-source project written in GNU C++ and which is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

What's vmips not?

vmips is not a vector extension to the MIPS instruction set; if you're looking for such a thing, try one of the following interesting links:

What does vmips run on? Does it require special hardware?

vmips, being a virtual machine simulator, does not require any special hardware. It has been tested under Intel-based PCs running FreeBSD and Linux, and a patch has been developed for compatibility with CompaQ Tru64 Unix on 64-bit Alpha hardware. Eventually, we expect to put vmips through more rigorous portability testing.

vmips is not useful without a full set of MIPS-targeted cross-compilation tools, however, and so the build process assumes their existence on your host system. The versions of gcc and binutils we recommend are listed in the documentation's Installation section.

What are the goals of the vmips project?

Goals of the project are to construct a simulator which is viable both as a teaching environment for computer architecture courses and as a development environment for applications and/or operating systems for the MIPS processor. Eventually we intend to implement this simulator on a wide variety of different operating systems and host processors.

When will it be ready? How can I help?

I don't have a lot of time to work on vmips, so development proceeds fairly slowly. But I will accept contributions of code if you send me patches via e-mail, and I am building new functionality (such as the much-needed serial console interfaces and the new memory-mapped device subsystem) as time permits.

Who's responsible for this?

vmips is maintained by Brian R. Gaeke. You should send any questions you have to the vmips mailing list, vmips at dgate.org.