Dynamips (Cisco Router Emulator)

Overview

Authors of this document: Fabien Devaux, Christophe Fillot, MtvE, Gordon Russell, Jeremy Grossmann and Flávio J. Saraiva.

Converted to markdown format by Daniel Lintott.

This is a continuation of Dynamips, based on the last development version and improved with patches wrote by various people from the community. This fork was named Dynamips-community up to the 0.2.8-community release and renamed to the original Dynamips on the 0.2.9 release.

You can compile two different versions of Dynamips with this code. Edit the Makefile to set the flags to suit your environment. One of the flags, DYNAMIPS_CODE, can be "stable" or "unstable".

Unstable is the code which contains most of the development code, and is in particular suitable for use on a 64 bit Mac. Unfortunately this has proved to be unstable on other platforms.

Stable contains the same code as Unstable, minus some mips64 bit optimisations and tcb code which seems to trigger instability on a number of platforms. You should probably use stable unless you have a very good reason.

For more information on the how to use Dynamips see the README file

License: GNU GPLv2 only

How to compile Dynamips

Dynamips now uses the CMake build system. To compile Dynamips you will need CMake and a working GCC or Clang compiler, as well as the build dependencies.

Build Dependencies

On Debian based systems the following build dependencies are required and can be installed using apt-get:

• libelf-dev
• libpcap0.8-dev

On Redhat based systems (CentOS, Fedora etc) the following build dependencies are required and can be installed using yum:

• elfutils-libelf-devel
• libpcap-devel

Similar packages should be available for most distributions, consult your distributions package list to find them.

MacPort & Homebrew:

• libelf
• cmake

Windows with Cygwin:

• Install Winpcap: https://www.winpcap.org/
• Install Cygwin 32-bit (setup-x86.exe): https://cygwin.com/install.html
• In Cygwin setup, install the make, cmake, gcc-core and git packages
• Additionally, install the libelf0 package (important: both bin and src)
• Download and unzip Winpcap developer pack: http://www.winpcap.org/devel.htm
• Copy the libraries WpdPack\Lib\libpacket.a and WpdPack\Lib\libwpcap.a to cygwin\lib\
• Copy all headers from WpdPack\Include to cygwin\usr\include\

Compiling (Linux/Mac)

Either download and extract a source tarball from the releases page or clone the Git repository using:

git clone git://github.com/GNS3/dynamips.git
cd dynamips
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

On OSX Yosemite you need to force usage of GCC 4.9:

cmake ..  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.9

And for building stable release:

cmake .. -DDYNAMIPS_CODE=stable  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.9

This will generate the Makefiles required for compiling Dynamips. To just build Dynamips simple run:

make

or to build and install Dynamips run:

make install

The specify a differant installation location run:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/target/path ..

Compiling (Windows)

Open the Cygwin terminal.

First, the libelf has to be manually compiled and installed:

<MIRROR_DOWNLOADS> is the directory used by your Cygwin mirror to download packages. It is possible that the libelf version differs from below.

cp <MIRROR_DOWNLOADS>/x86/release/libelf/libelf0/libelf0-0.8.13-2-src.tar.bz2 .
mkdir libelf && tar xvjf libelf0-0.8.13-2-src.tar.bz2 -C libelf
cd libelf
tar xvzf libelf-0.8.13.tar.gz
cd libelf-0.8.13
./configure
make
make install

Then, Dynamips can be build:

git clone git://github.com/GNS3/dynamips.git
cd dynamips
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

You will find dynamips.exe in the stable directory. Put cygwin1.dll from the Cygwin bin directory in the same directory as dynamips.exe to be able to start it from outside Cygwin terminal.

Releasing

• Update ChangeLog
• In common/dynamips.c update sw_version_tag with date
• Update RELEASE-NOTE
• Update CMakeLists.txt
• git tag the release

Useful Information

Forum: https://gns3.com/community

Repository: https://github.com/GNS3/dynamips

Bugtracker: https://github.com/GNS3/dynamips/issues