IBM Looks to Foster OpenPOWER Adoption with the Public Release of a POWER10 Functional Simulator
Simulating enough complexity to execute a full software stack, the new release aims to assist Linux developers in their porting efforts.
IBM and the OpenPOWER Foundation have announced the release of a publicly-accessible "functional simulator" for the POWER10 processor, allowing developers to begin working with the architecture without the need for dedicated hardware.
Interest in the POWER architecture has been on the rise since IBM announced it was to make the Power instruction set architecture (ISA) behind both POWER9 and POWER10 available under permissive open source licenses via the OpenPOWER Foundation, putting it in direct competition with the popular free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture. Now, it's making it easier for the ecosystem to gain steam without the need for anyone to shell out on physical hardware via the release of a functional simulator.
"This simulator provides enough POWER10 processor complex functionality to allow the entire software stack to execute," claims IBM's Brad Thomasson of the release. This includes loading, booting and running a little endian Linux environment. This publicly available simulation environment is designed to educate developers, facilitate porting of existing Linux applications to the POWER10 architecture, and enable new ones to be created."
The simulator includes a POWER10 hardware reference model plus full simulation of all the Power ISA instructions as implemented in POWER10, along with a range of different architectural areas. It does come with a warning, however: "Note that while the IBM POWER10 Functional Simulator serves as a full instruction set simulator for the POWER10 processor," Thomasson warns, "it may not model all aspects of the IBM Power Systems POWER10 hardware and thus may not exactly reflect the behavior of the POWER10 hardware."
The simulator is available now, alongside earlier releases for POWER8 and POWER9, on the IBM website.