On 4.1.2016 6:30, Steve Reinhardt wrote:
> It's great to know that SPARC is being used... not too long ago we
> discussed pulling the plug on SPARC support since we weren't aware of any
> users.

That would have been a disaster of epic proportions for us :-) Btw,
AFAIR, RTEMS is/was using gem5 for their sparc64 development too.

> A big problem with maintaining SPARC is that the only full-system SPARC
> regression test we have uses a proprietary Solaris boot image that can't be
> distributed, meaning many people can't run the regression and can't debug
> problems when they occur.  (That's why it took so long to fix the previous
> bug.)  If you have the capability of building a simple freely distributable
> full-system boot test that we could integrate with our regressions, that
> would actually help a lot in terms of our ability to keep SPARC support
> from rotting away.

I would love to see HelenOS used like that. What exactly do you need it
to do in this regard? Boot to some known state? Boot into a prompt? At
this moment, one needs to apply some patches to HelenOS in order to boot
into the shell. These patches basically switch HelenOS from using
TICK_COMPARE to using STICK_COMPARE. But it would be better if gem5
supported TICK_COMPARE, just as the T1000 does (I suspect they are
actually aliases).

There is also an issue that I observed in 1/5 cases when the boot
appears to hang just before the prompt is about to be displayed.

Let me know if you would be interested in obtaining an up-to-date
HelenOS image that you could boot. The ISO image is around 3M in size.

Regards,
Jakub

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 1:36 PM Palle Lyckegaard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Jakub Jermar wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks a lot. I hope that the sparc64 support in gem5 stays around
>>> indefinitely because as far as I know, gem5 is the only open source
>>> emulator capable of emulating sun4v and not requiring either a SPARC
>>> machine or Solaris.
>>
>> So do I - gem5 has been a big help during my work trying to get NetBSD
>> running on sun4v.
>>
>> Probably also very usefull for the other BSDs as well.
>>
>>>
>>> The issue preventing the unmodified version of HelenOS functioning
>>> properly is that for some reason gem5 panics on accesses to the
>>> TickCompare register. Which also means that the following fix seems
>>> incomplete:
>>>
>>> changeset:   11102:c77f3a9e59bb
>>> user:        Palle Lyckegaard <[email protected]>
>>> date:        Tue Sep 15 08:14:07 2015 -0500
>>> summary:     sparc: writing to tick_cmpr should not cause a panic
>>>
>>
>> The NetBSD porting effort hasn't reached a state yet where this issue
>> has popped up yet, so I guess my fix is incomplete. Sorry for that - will
>> have to work on this when I get to the isssue.
>>
>> Regards
>> Palle
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gem5-dev mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
>>
> _______________________________________________
> gem5-dev mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
> 

_______________________________________________
gem5-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev

Reply via email to