On Jan 27, 2011, at 4:00 PM, Gabe Black wrote: > I'm pretty close to having an X86_FS regression basically ready to go, > and one of the issues I had to straighten out was that the way the > default x86 root was configured was a little hacky and would always > clobber whatever other image was specified. The idea to use the default > settings gets substituted for the actual default settings early enough > in the existing scripts that you really need to make the SysConfig > object select the right image based on the ISA you're building in > buildEnv. This seems a little hacky, and it's fairly inflexible as far > as expanding ISA options to ones we already support or may support in > the future. I'd like to create a subdirectory in the existing > directories that are for kernel images and disk images named after > whatever arch they go with. There shouldn't be any ambiguity since it > seems very unlikely root disk images or kernels would be interchangeable > across architectures. Then, when using the default disk image, the > buildEnv would be inserted into the path and select an image or kernel > with a standard name and get what it needs. This still leaves the > dependence on buildEnv which would be nice to factor out, but I think > it's a step in the right direction. Any thoughts and/or alternative > suggestions? One other possibility that just occurred to me would be to > set up some symlinks or persistent variables in the scripts at an > early/low level that would have paths to these magic directories in > them. Then we could bury the dependence on buildEnv down in the bowels > of something where that sort of mid to low level hook probably belongs. > > Also, while thinking about this, I realized this could make it harder to > support, say, 32 bit and 64 bit versions of x86 Linux since there would > be only one default file name for the root disk image. This is a problem > in the regressions as well. Perhaps we should adopt the idea of an ISA > variant where it's still x86 or SPARC or ARM, but it's further > specialized into 32 or 64 bit, 32 or 64 bit or virtualized, thumb or > ARM, etc. This fits with my second idea above better than the first. > > Anyway, I don't really have any strong suggestions or blocking problems > here, this just looked like something that could use some organizing. Seems reasonable.... I would vote for something like binaries/(alpha|arm|x86|sparc|...)/(32|64|thumb|whatever|else)/files with a symlink of: binaries/(alpha|arm|x86|sparc|...)/default/ to whatever is a good default so the scripts can just use the default, but if we want to get more advanced in the future that is a possibility.
I think the same story for disk images would work reasonably well. Ali _______________________________________________ m5-dev mailing list m5-dev@m5sim.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/m5-dev
