[Gems-users] Slightly OT Simics SPARC/System Call Question

["James Poe" <gemsmaillist@xxxxxxxxx>]

I apologize in advance as the bulk of these two questions relate to Simics as opposed to Gems directly, but I would really appreciate it if some of the experts that have been using both on this list could point me in the right direction.

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with system calls on the Simics/Linux/Sunfire dumps.  I am very new to both Simics and Sparc ISA.  From the architectural manuals, it seems that system calls are invoked using the ta (trap all) instruction.  However, after printing out a trace of the instructions, it appears that the ta instruction only appears in two forms (as a Trap_Instruction_3 and a Trap_Instruction_16).  Unfortunately it seems as though 3 occurs far too infrequently, and 16 too frequently (for instance even when the terminal is idle) to be system calls.  Does anyone know what I might be overlooking, or how to detect system calls using the base Simics framework running the Linux/Sparc ISA?  Also, does Gems have any knowledge of System Calls?

Also, as I am very new to Simics, I was wondering if anyone knew of a source of example scripts that I could use to teach myself from.  I've looked through most of the documentation manuals that come with the academic version of Simics but I'm still a bit lost.  Examples of the types of things I would like to be able to do in the future would be to record specific register values on every system call, access stack pointers at certain times, etc.

Thanks in advance for any direction you can provide,

James