| layout | title | permalink |
|---|---|---|
page |
PC Trace Utility |
/tests/pcx86/trace/ |
WARNING: This utility is obsolete. It has been superseded by test386, which, going forward, serves as our new model for instruction-level testing. As a result, the traceLog() functionality mentioned below has been removed from the PCjs source code (but you can always dig it back up if you really want it).
TRACE.COM takes an instruction log, as recorded by the PCjs Debugger's traceLog() function, and "plays" the instructions back on another machine DOS-compatible 8086 machine, verifying that:
- Results match the recorded results;
- Any "modified" flags match the recorded flags; and
- Any "unmodified" flags remain unmodified
The format of an instruction log entry is a series of lines (ASCII characters terminated by an LF), where each line looks like:
F000:EEFF SHL(0480,0002,F006) 1200,F006
specifically:
address, space, instruction, parenthesis, dst operand, comma, src operand, comma,
input flags, parenthesis, space, result, comma, and output flags
WARNING: For the shift and rotate tests to pass on a real x86 CPU, we either have to distinguish between single-bit shifts and multi-bit shifts (because the latter leaves PS_OF in an "undefined" state), or we have to ignore PS_OF altogether. For now, I'm specifying PS_ALL_BUT_OF for those instructions, even though we'll be missing OVERFLOW validation for all single-bit shifts and rotates.
To load TRACE.COM and TRACE.TXT onto a virtual disk image that PCjs can access, you can add an "autoMount" setting to your PCjs configuration that will dynamically generate a fresh disk image every time the machine is loaded, via the DiskDump API. This is useful when you're constantly generating new test results:
<fdc id="fdcNEC" autoMount='{B:{name:"Trace Tests",path:"/tests/pcx86/trace/trace.com;trace.txt"}}'/>Alternatively, if you want to run the tests in another virtual PC environment (eg, VMware Fusion), you can create an IMG disk image from a directory using DiskDump's command-line interface:
cd tests/pcx86
node ../../modules/diskdump/bin/diskdump --dir=trace --format=img --output=trace.img
OS X users can also create an ISO image like so:
hdiutil makehybrid -o tests/pcx86/trace.iso tests/pcx86/trace -iso -joliet