As one of the proverbial users whose experience is under discussion,
maybe I can butt in.
I think it's important to realize that not everyone uses self-managed
machines with root access. I, for one, don't have root or access to a
package manager on my regular work machine (Scientific Linux 6). SL6
seems to lag RHEL with package support, so as far as I can tell,
protobuf (and even tcmalloc) are not installed and not even available
(http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/x86_64/os/Packages/)
If I want these libraries, I need to build them and any dependencies
locally from tarballs or convince the admins to do it. If the admins are
convinced and manually build the libs (unlikely), they then need to
schedule reboots for all the machines in the school. Fun fun.
I could, of course, switch to a self-managed desktop machine, except
that I need to regularly run lots of things on our server farm. This is
where it gets really interesting. Given that the farm admins have a
responsibility to keep the farm running for all the various groups
buying compute resources, there's no way they're going to manually build
libraries not officially supported by the distro and then support those
libraries for the rest of time (I already tried to convince them on
libperftools--no dice). Again I need to build the libraries locally and
then make sure that everything works across a finicky server farm, all
it's various nodes and whatnot.
Since I've already invested so much time into using gem5, if another
dependency comes on board, I'll just have to make it work (or not
upgrade). I doubt a newbie would go through all this trouble, though.
-Erik
On 09/12/12 16:09, Ali Saidi wrote:
On Dec 9, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Nilay Vaish wrote:
On Sun, 9 Dec 2012, Andreas Hansson wrote:
May I ask why you see this as a problem? Any Unix/Linux/OSx system from the
last 5+ years has these dependencies as packages (and I bet they work smoother
than e.g. swig :-)
I doubt that this statement is true. I am using RHEL 6 and it does not have
protoc installed. I am guessing that would mean people who use Fedora will not
have it installed either. Ubuntu (12.10) has it. I don't know about Mint or
other distributions.
As far as package availability protobufs is available since Fedora 16 as well
as EL6. It's also available in all currently supported Ubuntu versions as well
as mint and debian and just about everything else:
http://pkgs.org/search/?keyword=protobuf
So I think package availability is a separate concern from user experience.
It's absolutely true that there would be another dependency, the question in my
mind is that dependency a larger burden than we currently expect from the user
and are the benefits of the library worth it? I think this is the best possible
path toward being able to output memory traces, which we do seem to get a fair
number of requests for on the mailing list.
This may not affect ARM, but one of the reasons why I am involved with gem5 is
that I would like people in architecture to be using the simulator that I have
contributed to.
I think ARM is completely committed making gem5 successful in the broader
architecture community, as evidenced by the large number of change sets with
committers from ARM.
Ali
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