Hi Danny, On 05/05/2016 03:03 PM, Danny Walters wrote: > I’d like to use gem5 to simulate a bare-metal program running on a LEON3 (a > 32-bit SPARC v8 processor). Running this on the currently supported > UltraSPARC T1 should work fine since the two processors are binary > compatible, however it seems like gem5 only currently supports syscall > emulation mode (on a good day) and not bare-metal.
AFAICR, the V8 and UltraSPARC T1 are binary-compatible only on the application software level, and only in the V8 -> T1 direction. System software is quite a different story and the differences between the two are pretty significant. As for how good gem5 is at simulating bare-metal UltraSPARC T1, I think it's pretty good. We can use it to run a slightly patched version of HelenOS. > I’ve read some of the threads regarding SPARC support over the past year > (including the one where it was debated whether support should be dropped > entirely because it’s so unlikely that anyone will ever in the future want > to run gem with SPARC again… I found that one pretty funny) – so I get that > there isn’t much being done there. But… by the way.. SPARC isn’t dead… > as Steve had mentioned in a previous post, the open-source LEON design is > alive and well and I’m aware of several projects that use it. Oracle seems to be very committed to the successors of the UltraSPARC T1 architecture. They've even published the newer architecture and processor documentation. And yes, having a bare-metal LEON3 support in gem5 would be also of great interest to HelenOS. Best, Jakub _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
