SimOS

SimOS was a full system simulator, developed in the Stanford University in the late nineties in the research group of Mendel Rosenblum.^[1] It was enabled to run IRIX 5.3 on MIPS, and Unix variants on Alpha. ^[2]

SimOS-PPC was forked from the original SimOS as IBM's internal project, running a modified AIX kernel and userland in an emulator, developed by Tom Keller and his team in the Austin lab of IBM.^[3] IBM used SimOS to facilitate development of new systems. The software used in this project is now publicly available for download for AIX 4.3 licensees.^[4]

Linux/SimOS was "...a Linux operating system port to SimOS, which is a complete machine simulator from Stanford. The motivation for Linux/SimOS is to alleviate the limitations of SimOS, which only supports proprietary operating systems."^[5]

SimBCM is an open source full system simulator based on SimOS. It simulates BCM1250, a dual-core MIPS64 SOC of Broadcom. The entire source code of SimBCM is distributed under GPL.^[6] It is capable of running the Linux kernel or the NICTA::Pistachio L4 microkernel.

The currently available commercial product, Virtutech Simics was derived from the work of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and was originally developed to run a full system simulation of Solaris on SPARC platform.^[7] Simics was used by IBM to help develop AIX 6.1 on a simulation of the POWER6 hardware.^[8]

RSIM was the "Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessors", developed at the Rice University in the late 1990s. It was able to run on Solaris, IRIX and HP-UX. The simulator is available under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License agreement. The development is finished.^[9]

M5 Developed at the University of Michigan, M5 simulates Alpha and SPARC hardware, with support for other architectures in progress. [10]