Supported Architectures

M5 is a flexible architecture simulator that supports a number of ISAs and operating systems for both full-system simulation (booting an entire operating system) and syscall emulation (running one or more applications by emulating syscalls). A complete list of supported combinations is listed below.

Syscall Emulation

Modifying M5 to support additional ISAs in syscall emulation mode is far easier than for full-system simulation. As such all new architectures to-date have used syscall emulation as a stepping stone to full-system simulation.

• ALPHA -- Tru64, Linux
• SPARC -- Linux, Solaris
• MIPS -- Linux
• ARM -- Some support, actively being worked on
• x86 -- Linux

Note: Newer versions of Solaris do not support static linking so Solaris syscall emulation isn't used. Implementation of a dynamic linker in M5 (or M5 executing ld.so) is possible, but it hasn't been implemented.

Full-System Simulation

• ALPHA -- Linux, FreeBSD
• SPARC -- Solaris
• MIPS -- Linux and bare metal support started, lots of work needed
• ARM -- None, but support for Linux planned
• x86/64 -- In progress, actively being worked on