This project started as a coursework for our Y2 Computer Architecture module @ImperialCollegeLondon. It involved:
- Developing MIPS CPU simulator, which can accurately execute MIPS-1 big-endian binaries
- Creating a thorough testbench
The compiler can be built using the command:
make simulator
in the root of the repository, producing the bin/mips_simulator file.
A Binary can then be simulated using:
bin/mips_simulator <file_name>.bin
On startup all MIPS registers will be zero, any uninitialised memory will be zero, and the program counter will point at the first instruction in memory.
The Testbench can be built using the command:
make testbench
in the root of the repository, producing the bin/mips_testbench file.
An example of running the testbench on some simulator would be:
bin/mips_testbench ~/path/to/simulator
The testbench outputs useful tests and log files in a folder called test/output.
It also prints a CSV file to stdout, giving an overview of test results and possible errors.
We wrote all our testcases in MIPS Assembly. To get the corresponding Binaries, we used Olly Larkin's "MIPS Binary Instruction File Generator" which is MIT licensed and can be found here: https://github.com/olly-larkin/mips-parser To write testcases more efficiently, we added a bash script to bach compile all assembly files and filter out important information from the comments in each file (Name, Description, References) The binary files for the Jump instruction had do be converted by hand. To do so we used the following MIPS converter and Hex editor: https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~csci320/mips_web/ https://hexed.it