MMIX mmoimg
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mmoimg - converting MMIX object files to image files
This page describes mmoimg, a modification of mmotype that can be used to produce image files from mmo files.
Last update: Dec. 8, 2011
What is an mmo file?
The MMIXware assembler, mmixal, produces MMIX object files, short mmo files, in a special format which the instruction level simulator, mmix, can read directly into memory.What is an image file?
When the MMIX simulator loads an mmo file into its virtual memory, it converts an mmo file into a string of 264 byte, the memory image. The complete memory image is too large to fit into a file of reasonable size, but fortuantely, most of the bytes in memory are zero. Hence, it is usually sufficient to store only the important parts of the memory image in an image file. The program mmoimg will consider only bytes that are specified in the mmo file as important. Further, it will restict the image file to the memory range between a given base address and an upper bound.How to use mmoimg?
The simplest use of mmoimg is like this:mmoimg file.mmoThis will produce file.img from file.mmo containing the memory image created by file.mmo in the negative address range starting at 0x8000 0000 0000 0000.
The restriction to the negative address range is natural for MMIX since negative addresses are maped directly to physical addresses (by ignoring the sign bit). Therefore the default base address is 0x8000 0000 0000 0000 and the default upper bound is 0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF.
A different base address and upper bound can be specified on the command line like this:
mmoimg -b 0 -u 2000000000000000 file.mmoThis will produce an image containing just the text segment of MMIX. The MMIX text segement starts at address 0 and ends at 1FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF, just before the beginning of the data segment.
Still, the image file will not stretch all the way up from the base address to the beginning of the data segement, but will contain only those few bytes of the text segment that are specified in the mmo file. It will, however, contain zero bytes from the given base address to the first byte specified in the mmo file. This padding at the beginning is useful to have an image file with a fixed start address independent of the mmo file. There is no padding at the end of the image file.
To get some more information about the mmo file, the options -l (listing) and -v (verbose) can be used to get (plenty) of output while mmoimg is running.
Example
In some situations, it is desirable to use the MMIX assembly language to specify code and data which is not intended to be loaded into memory using the simulator. In these situations, an image file, containing an exact image of the virtual memory is often a more convenient format than the mmo file itself.For example, the ROM simulator of the virtual motherboard project (VMB) can be used to map any binary file at any address into memory. To produce such a binary file containing MMIX code and data, you can write a mmix source file, assemble it with mmixal into an mmo file and then convert it to a binary image file using mmoimg. This is described in the VMB Hello World example.
Sources
mmoimg is written as a change file mmoimg.ch. It is applied to mmotype.w like this:ctangle mmotype.w mmoimg.ch mmoimg.cto obtain mmoimg.c as output file. The file mmoimg.tex is produced in the same way with cweave.
