I found the problem within the alpha console code. First, a few variables that should've been longs were ints, causing any memory size of >2GB to be reported wrong. The second problem was the hard coding the MDESC table size to the equivalent of 2GB only, so anything over 2GB would fail booting as well.
I've attached the bug fixed console.c code to this message for anyone who would be interested in running M5 sims with more than 2GB of simulated RAM. Geoff _____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ali Saidi Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 12:17 PM To: M5 users mailing list Subject: Re: [m5-users] Question about swapdisk, and supported RAM size On Oct 18, 2007, at 11:59 AM, Geoffrey Blake wrote: I'm still running m5-2.0b2 with my TM extensions but have run into a problem. I am running a benchmark that takes up a very large amount of virtual memory, and eventually needs to use the swap disk in FS mode. My first question is, after looking at the code for a little bit, it looks like the COW disk is brought into main memory as it is written to, but does the disk image in memory just keep growing if needed inside M5? Yes, although the OS should swap out unused parts. It seems this would be the case because after running my benchmark for a few hours, the virtual memory footprint was 11GB and continued growing. I've calculated my worst case memory footprint for the benchmark in question at needing ~3GB of memory, so running with 1024MB of RAM the swap disk will be heavily used. Also, I'm trying to add more RAM than 1024MB to the simulation to avoid using the swap disk image, but anything over that makes Linux kernel panic. I've checked the boot log and I'm getting bizarre memory ranges like the following: Memory cluster 0 [0 - 392] Memory cluster 1 [392 - -392] Why would Linux be receiving a negative memory range? I'll keep looking, I guess it could be the console code passing bad values up to the kernel, or something not using a 64bit integer. I think the problem is likely the Alpha Console that sets up the values before handing them off to the operating system. There are a lot of ints in there that should probably be longs. Ali
console.c
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