All the functionality of the built-in simulator is available with the optional product. All the information in this section applies to both versions of VxSim. For information specific to the optional product, see H.5 VxSim Networking Component.

Tornado 2.0 comes configured with basic VxSim on all hosts. Installing and starting Tornado as described in the Tornado Getting Started Guide installs and starts the basic VxSim.

VxSim automatically starts when you request a function that requires a connection to a target. For example, when you request download of a module, if you have not started a target server VxSim and a target server are automatically started.

You can also start VxSim from the command line or the VxSim icon on the launcher (UNIX) or from the Start>Run dialog box (Windows) using the command vxWorks.

As with other targets, you can reboot VxSim by typing CTRL+X in the shell.

Windows: Close the VxSim window.

HP-UX: Close the VxSim window or use CTRL+\ in the VxSim window.

Solaris: Normally, CTRL+\ is mapped to SIGQUIT, which is the correct way to exit VxSim. however, in Solaris 2.6, the default terminal does not have this mapping. To check your mapping, use:

% stty -a

To change it to CTRL+\, use:

% stty quit ^\

Then you can exit VxSim by typing CTRL+\ in the VxSim window.

	CAUTION: Do not attempt to exit a VxSim session running ULIP on Solaris 2.5 or 2.6 using SIGKILL. This prevents VxSim from restarting properly.

System-mode debugging allows developers to suspend the entire VxWorks operating system.¹ One notable application of system mode is to debug ISRs, which--because they run outside any task context--are not visible to debugging tools in the default task mode. For more discussion of system mode, see the chapters Shell and Debugger in the Tornado User's Guide.

All three simulators are automatically configured for system mode debugging by including the WDB pipe back end.

VxSim can use any VxWorks file system. The default file system is the pass-through file system, passFs, which is unique to VxSim.

passFs allows direct access to any files on the host. Essentially, the VxWorks functions open( ), read( ), write( ), and close( ) eventually call the host equivalents in the host library libc.a. With passFs, you can open any file available on the host, including NFS-mounted files. By default, the INCLUDE_PASSFS macro (UNIX) or the INCLUDE_NTPASSFS (Windows) is enabled to cause this file system to be mounted on startup.

For more information on passFs, see the library entry for passFsLib in the VxWorks Reference Manual or HTML help. For more information on other VxWorks file systems, see 4. Local File Systems.

1:  System mode is sometimes also called external mode, reflecting that the target agent operates externally to the VxWorks system in this mode.