* Johan Rydberg jrydberg@gnu.org [061107 14:28]:
I would say that this is a shame. We really need a top-notch full system simulator. But doing complete and correct simulation of chipsets is hard, error prone and quite boring. Therefor emulators like QEMU take the short path, and put in a "phony" BIOS and more or less do not implement a northbridge at all.
I know SimNow can theoretically do it, and it can be enhanced by Plugins for CPU, northbridge, southbridge, other bridges, other pci devices
But I doubt AMD is going to add Intel CPU plugins to it ;-)
Can Simics to that stuff?
What we need is a full-system simulator with the following characteristics;
- correct,
- deterministic,
- visible device state,
- visible cpu state,
- scriptable,
- and pluggable (for profiling and coverage tools)
Note that I have not put "fast" on the list. I think that is secondary for our use case.
For this simulator to be done, a whole lot of understanding of the hardware components is required, maybe including their errata. Adding support for a new component for such a simulator _might_ be more work than writing a bios for the same chipset.
But no doubt this would be great to have.
Stefan