Ski Release Notes

Known Problems

• After hitting an instruction breakpoint and reading the code at the address of the breakpoint, attempting to resume execution with the "run" command may result in a corrupted instruction-bundle at the breakpoint. This problem can be avoided by single-stepping across the breakpoint before resuming execution with "run".

v0.9.81-l6 (Nov 2004)

• Ski now uses the getpt() library call to open the pseudo-terminal for the console window. This fixes compatibility-problems with systems which do not have the /dev/ptyXX devices any longer, as is the case for recent Fedora Core distributions and for udev users.

v0.9.81-l5 (May 2004)

• The Ski binary is now linked dynamically against the C library to prevent situations where the C library is incompatible with the installed NSS resolver libraries.
• Make Ski identify itself as a McKinley-type CPU (family==0x1f) and simulate 64 PMU registers (64 PMC and 64 PMD registers). Note that Ski doesn't implement a real PMU. It only simulates the PMC/PMD registers, but they have no useful effect.
• Fix a bug which could corrupt the simulated state when a data breakpoint got triggered by an "alloc" instruction (i.e., as a result of mandatory RSE traffic).
• ar.csd is now treated as an IA-64 register, rather than an IA-32 register. This allows setting all 64 bits.
• An environment SKI_PAGE_SIZE has been added which controls the granularity with which Ski will allocate simulated physical memory in system mode. This can be useful in conjunction with data breakpoints, since such breakpoints cannot cross a Ski page-boundary.
• Debug-register support has been re-enabled in Ski. However, the instruction debug-register support is only partly supported (breakpoint usually won't trigger). Data debug-registers should work as expected.

v0.9.81-l4 (Dec 2003)

• Fix a bug where setting an instruction breakpoint could result in Ski crashing (with a SIGSEGV) due to an infinite recursion.
• Allow virtual-mode data breakpoints. Note that such breakpoints are pseudo-virtual, just like the virtual instruction breakpoints. That is, Ski will translate a virtual breakpoint address into a physical address as soon as a valid translation exists in the TLB for the virtual address.

v0.9.81-l3 (Jul 2003)

• The "cstack" no longer causes Ski to hang if ar.bspstore happens to point to an invalid address.
• The "cstack" command now works on x86 as well.
• Ski now supports simulated disks > 2 Gbytes even on x86.
• In system mode, instruction breakpoints now can be set again even if there is no TLB entry for the breakpoint address.

v0.9.81-l2 (Apr 2003)

• A bug has been fixed which caused Ski to ignore local labels (to be precise, it ignored symbols with no ELF type).
• The "cstack" command is now able to step across Linux kernel interrupt frames.

v0.9.81-l1 (Feb 2003)

• Ski has been updated for the latest IA-64 architecture revision (SDM v2.1). In particular, support for the 16-byte atomic operations has been added.
• The cstack command now works and displays a backtrace of the current call-stack.
• Ski now additionally picks up symbol information from the dynamic symbol table section, if it exists.
• The auto-detection of user- vs. system-mode should now be more reliable. If a program is linked for region 0 (as is the case for the Linux bootloader, for example), system-mode is assumed by default. Auto-detection can be overridden with command line options -forceuser and -forcesystem.
• The Linux version of the X11 app-defaults file (XSki) has been updated to add a binding for the backspace key and to default the background color to gray.
• An IA-64 binary of Ski is now available.

v0.943l-2 (April 2001)

• Fixed mmap() to unmap any existing mappings when MAP_FIXED is used.
• The X windows accelerator keys now work in "xski." Specifically, "Page Up," "Page Down," " Down" and "Up" can be used to scroll around in the various Ski windows when running under X11.
• The curses interface no longer has the cursor positioning problems that used to show after commands such as "pf." This problem was due to a bug in the Linux ncurses library which has been fixed in ncurses-5.1.
• Ski is now compatible with the latest stable GNU toolchain (a.k.a., "Nov 17, 2000" snapshot) and with glibc-2.2. In particular, Ski now passes the AT_PAGESZ and AT_CLKTCK auxiliary tags required by applications linked against glibc-2.2.
• A bug has been fixed in Ski which prevented the kernel "make menuconfig" from working.
• The system call emulation in Ski has been brought in sync with Linux v2.4.1. In particular, Ski now implements the new versions of stat(), fstat(), lstat() and getdents(). The system calls pivot_root(), mincore(), and madvise() are not supported under Ski (they will result in a warning message of the form "unimplemented system call").
• Updated network support. Added clearer error messages. No longer fails if it cannot bind to interface, but simply disables network support.
• Updated HOWTO-ski-networking.
• The shmctl() system call now also supports the SHM_LOCK and SHM_UNLOCK commands. The semctl() system call now also supports the GETALL, SETALL, GETVAL, GETPID, GETNCNT, and SETVAL commands.

v0.873l-2 (August 2000)

• The following system calls have been fixed and should now work correctly: ftruncate(), truncate(), getsockopt(), readlink(), shmat(), shmdt(), shmget(). There is a known issue with shmat() that prevents it from operating correctly if the shared memory id (first argument to shmat()) was not obtained via shmget(). As long as the id was obtained via shmget(), shmat() should work fine.
• The following system calls now support IPC_RMID (but no other IPC_* command): semctl(), msgctl(), shmctl().
• Big-endian mode should now work correctly.
• Single step trap is now working.

v0.873l-1 (June 2000)

• Initial release.