Commit graph

195 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Andreas Hansson 66df7b7fd4 config: Add the ability to read a config file using C++ and Python
This patch adds the ability to load in config.ini files generated from
gem5 into another instance of gem5 built without Python configuration
support. The intended use case is for configuring gem5 when it is a
library embedded in another simulation system.

A parallel config file reader is also provided purely in Python to
demonstrate the approach taken and to provided similar functionality
for as-yet-unknown use models. The Python configuration file reader
can read both .ini and .json files.

C++ configuration file reading:

A command line option has been added for scons to enable C++ configuration
file reading: --with-cxx-config

There is an example in util/cxx_config that shows C++ configuration in action.
util/cxx_config/README explains how to build the example.

Configuration is achieved by the object CxxConfigManager. It handles
reading object descriptions from a CxxConfigFileBase object which
wraps a config file reader. The wrapper class CxxIniFile is provided
which wraps an IniFile for reading .ini files. Reading .json files
from C++ would be possible with a similar wrapper and a JSON parser.

After reading object descriptions, CxxConfigManager creates
SimObjectParam-derived objects from the classes in the (generated with this
patch) directory build/ARCH/cxx_config

CxxConfigManager can then build SimObjects from those SimObjectParams (in an
order dictated by the SimObject-value parameters on other objects) and bind
ports of the produced SimObjects.

A minimal set of instantiate-replacing member functions are provided by
CxxConfigManager and few of the member functions of SimObject (such as drain)
are extended onto CxxConfigManager.

Python configuration file reading (configs/example/read_config.py):

A Python version of the reader is also supplied with a similar interface to
CxxConfigFileBase (In Python: ConfigFile) to config file readers.

The Python config file reading will handle both .ini and .json files.

The object construction strategy is slightly different in Python from the C++
reader as you need to avoid objects prematurely becoming the children of other
objects when setting parameters.

Port binding also needs to be strictly in the same port-index order as the
original instantiation.
2014-10-16 05:49:37 -04:00
Andreas Hansson b14f521e5f scons: Add Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan) option
This patch adds the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan) for clang and
gcc >= 4.9. Due to the performance impact, the usage is guarded by a
command-line option.
2014-10-16 05:49:36 -04:00
Curtis Dunham ded540a661 scons: Add --without-tcmalloc build option
Disabling tcmalloc is required for valgrind's memcheck to work properly;
this option makes it easier to create such a build.
2014-09-22 14:37:23 -05:00
Andrew Bardsley d8502ee46d config: Add a --without-python option to build process
Add the ability to build libgem5 without embedded Python or the
ability to configure with Python.

This is a prelude to a patch to allow config.ini files to be loaded
into libgem5 using only C++ which would make embedding gem5 within
other simulation systems easier.

This adds a few registration interfaces to things which cross
between Python and C++.  Namely: stats dumping and SimObject resolving
2014-10-16 05:49:32 -04:00
Andreas Hansson e0e8b08a42 ext: Add DRAMPower to enable on-line DRAM power modelling
This patch adds the open-source (BSD 3-clause) tool DRAMPower, commit
8d3cf4bbb10aa202d850ef5e5e3e4f53aa668fa6, to be built as a part of the
simulator. We have chosen this specific version of DRAMPower as it
provides the necessary functionality, and future updates will be
coordinated with the DRAMPower development team. The files added only
include the bits needed to build the library, thus excluding all
memory specifications, traces, and the stand-alone DRAMPower
command-line tool.

A future patch includes the DRAMPower functionality in the DRAM
controller, to enable on-line DRAM power modelling, and avoid using
post-processing of traces.
2014-10-09 17:52:03 -04:00
Andreas Hansson 3f6dc3c571 scons: Warn for known gcc and swig incompatibilities 2014-10-09 17:51:57 -04:00
Andreas Hansson deb2200671 scons: Address issues related to gcc 4.9.1
Fix a number few minor issues to please gcc 4.9.1. Removing the
'-fuse-linker-plugin' flag means no libraries are part of the LTO
process, but hopefully this is an acceptable loss, as the flag causes
issues on a lot of systems (only certain combinations of gcc, ld and
ar work).
2014-09-27 09:08:34 -04:00
Curtis Dunham e553ca67d4 tests: automatically kill regressions that take too long
When GNU coreutils 'timeout' is available, limit each regression
simulation to 4 hours.
2014-08-25 14:32:00 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 326662b01b arch, cpu: Factor out the ExecContext into a proper base class
We currently generate and compile one version of the ISA code per CPU
model. This is obviously wasting a lot of resources at compile
time. This changeset factors out the interface into a separate
ExecContext class, which also serves as documentation for the
interface between CPUs and the ISA code. While doing so, this
changeset also fixes up interface inconsistencies between the
different CPU models.

The main argument for using one set of ISA code per CPU model has
always been performance as this avoid indirect branches in the
generated code. However, this argument does not hold water. Booting
Linux on a simulated ARM system running in atomic mode
(opt/10.linux-boot/realview-simple-atomic) is actually 2% faster
(compiled using clang 3.4) after applying this patch. Additionally,
compilation time is decreased by 35%.
2014-09-03 07:42:22 -04:00
Andreas Sandberg 6b908211e6 scons: Silence clang 3.4 warnings on Ubuntu 12.04
This changeset fixes three types of warnings that occur in clang 3.4
on Ubuntu 12.04:

 * Certain versions of libstdc++ (primarily 4.8) use struct and class
   interchangeably. This triggers a warning in clang.

 * Swig has a tendency to generate code with the register class which
   was deprecated in C++11. This triggers a deprecation warning in
   clang.

 * Swig sometimes generates Python wrapper code which returns
   uninitialized values. It's unclear if this is actually a problem
   (the cases might be limited to failure paths). We'll silence these
   warnings for now since there is little we can do about the
   generated code.
2014-08-13 06:57:28 -04:00
Andreas Hansson b90bdcf8d0 scons: Warn for incompatible gcc and binutils
It seems gcc >4.8 does not get along well with binutils <= 2.22, and
to help users this patch adds a warning with an indication for how to
fix the issue. It might even be worth adding a Exit(-1) and stop the
build.
2014-08-10 05:38:56 -04:00
Andreas Hansson fdb965f5c1 scons: Bump the compiler version to gcc 4.6 and clang 3.0
This patch bumps the supported version of gcc from 4.4 to 4.6, and
clang from 2.9 to 3.0. This enables, amongst other things, range-based
for loops, lambda expressions, etc. The STL implementation shipping
with 4.6 also has a full functional implementation of unique_ptr and
shared_ptr.
2014-06-10 17:44:39 -04:00
Curtis Dunham fe27f937aa arch: teach ISA parser how to split code across files
This patch encompasses several interrelated and interdependent changes
to the ISA generation step.  The end goal is to reduce the size of the
generated compilation units for instruction execution and decoding so
that batch compilation can proceed with all CPUs active without
exhausting physical memory.

The ISA parser (src/arch/isa_parser.py) has been improved so that it can
accept 'split [output_type];' directives at the top level of the grammar
and 'split(output_type)' python calls within 'exec {{ ... }}' blocks.
This has the effect of "splitting" the files into smaller compilation
units.  I use air-quotes around "splitting" because the files themselves
are not split, but preprocessing directives are inserted to have the same
effect.

Architecturally, the ISA parser has had some changes in how it works.
In general, it emits code sooner.  It doesn't generate per-CPU files,
and instead defers to the C preprocessor to create the duplicate copies
for each CPU type.  Likewise there are more files emitted and the C
preprocessor does more substitution that used to be done by the ISA parser.

Finally, the build system (SCons) needs to be able to cope with a
dynamic list of source files coming out of the ISA parser. The changes
to the SCons{cript,truct} files support this. In broad strokes, the
targets requested on the command line are hidden from SCons until all
the build dependencies are determined, otherwise it would try, realize
it can't reach the goal, and terminate in failure. Since build steps
(i.e. running the ISA parser) must be taken to determine the file list,
several new build stages have been inserted at the very start of the
build. First, the build dependencies from the ISA parser will be emitted
to arch/$ISA/generated/inc.d, which is then read by a new SCons builder
to finalize the dependencies. (Once inc.d exists, the ISA parser will not
need to be run to complete this step.) Once the dependencies are known,
the 'Environments' are made by the makeEnv() function. This function used
to be called before the build began but now happens during the build.
It is easy to see that this step is quite slow; this is a known issue
and it's important to realize that it was already slow, but there was
no obvious cause to attribute it to since nothing was displayed to the
terminal. Since new steps that used to be performed serially are now in a
potentially-parallel build phase, the pathname handling in the SCons scripts
has been tightened up to deal with chdir() race conditions. In general,
pathnames are computed earlier and more likely to be stored, passed around,
and processed as absolute paths rather than relative paths.  In the end,
some of these issues had to be fixed by inserting serializing dependencies
in the build.

Minor note:
For the null ISA, we just provide a dummy inc.d so SCons is never
compelled to try to generate it. While it seems slightly wrong to have
anything in src/arch/*/generated (i.e. a non-generated 'generated' file),
it's by far the simplest solution.
2014-05-09 18:58:47 -04:00
Curtis Dunham ad019c5c58 scons: Require SWIG >= 2.0.4 and remove vector typemaps
SWIG commit fd666c1 (*) made it unnecessary for gem5 to have these
typemaps to handle Vector types.

* fd666c1440
2014-05-09 18:58:46 -04:00
Andreas Hansson c970c28af1 scons: Fix python-config parsing by adding strip()
This patch fixes an issue with the way the python-config path is
parsed, as it caused issues on systems where a newline ended up being
included in the path.
2014-04-13 10:07:55 -04:00
Stian Hvatum 698c4c792d scons: compile on systems where python2 and python3 co-exist
Compile gem5 on systems where python2 and python3 co-exists without any
changes in path. python2-config is chosen over python-config if it exists.

Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
2014-04-10 13:40:15 -05:00
Curtis Dunham a3d582f8e6 scons: Shush scons
make 'scons -s' actually silent.
2014-03-23 11:11:51 -04:00
Mitch Hayenga 7084e31341 scons: Fix clang version identification for OSX
The version string may have additional trailing information
2014-03-07 15:56:23 -05:00
Andreas Hansson ffc838cd00 scons: Add PROTOC from the environment
This patch adds PROTOC to the build environment.
2014-02-18 05:50:58 -05:00
Andreas Hansson bf2f178f85 mem: Add a wrapped DRAMSim2 memory controller
This patch adds DRAMSim2 as a memory controller by wrapping the
external library and creating a sublass of AbstractMemory that bridges
between the semantics of gem5 and the DRAMSim2 interface.

The DRAMSim2 wrapper extracts the clock period from the config
file. There is no way of extracting this information from DRAMSim2
itself, so we simply read the same config file and get it from there.

To properly model the response queue, the wrapper keeps track of how
many transactions are in the actual controller, and how many are
stacking up waiting to be sent back as responses (in the wrapper). The
latter requires us to move away from the queued port and manage the
packets ourselves. This is due to DRAMSim2 not having any flow control
on the response path.

DRAMSim2 assumes that the transactions it is given are matching the
burst size of the choosen memory. The wrapper checks to ensure the
cache line size of the system matches the burst size of DRAMSim2 as
there are currently no provisions to split the system requests. In
theory we could allow a cache line size smaller than the burst size,
but that would lead to inefficient use of the DRAM, so for not we
fatal also in this case.
2014-02-18 05:50:53 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 4b8be6a90b kvm: Set the perf exclude_host attribute if available
The performance counting framework in Linux 3.2 and onwards supports
an attribute to exclude events generated by the host when running
KVM. Setting this attribute allows us to get more reliable
measurements of the guest machine. For example, on a highly loaded
system, the instruction counts from the guest can be severely
distorted by the host kernel (e.g., by page fault handlers).

This changeset introduces a check for the attribute and enables it in
the KVM CPU if present.
2013-10-15 10:09:23 +02:00
Stan Czerniawski c2553745c9 build: Enable color diagnostics in clang by preserving TERM. 2013-10-17 10:20:45 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 05ed2deda6 kvm: Only include KVM support for supported kernels
This patch adds a check to ensure that the KVM API provided by the
running kernel is what we are expecting.
2013-10-02 06:08:45 -04:00
Andreas Sandberg d3d53938c0 scons, kvm: Check for the presence of POSIX timers
The kvm-based CPU module requires support for POSIX timers. This
changeset adds a check for POSIX timers and ensures that gem5 is
linked with librt if necessary. KVM support is disabled if POSIX
timers are not supported by the host. This fixes a compilation issue
for some glibc versions where clock_nanosleep and timer_create are in
different libraries.
2013-10-01 15:56:47 +02:00
Andreas Sandberg d3937f3b37 ext: Include libfputils
This changeset includes libfputils from revision bbf0d61d75. This
library can be used to convert to and from 80-bit floats and query the
type of an 80-bit float, which is needed to support the x87 FPU.
2013-09-30 09:40:26 +02:00
Andreas Sandberg 599b59b387 kvm: Initial x86 support
This changeset adds support for KVM on x86. Full support is split
across a number of commits since some features are relatively
complex. This changeset includes support for:

 * Integer state synchronization (including segment regs)
 * CPUID (gem5's CPUID values are inserted into KVM)
 * x86 legacy IO (remapped and handled by gem5's memory system)
 * Memory mapped IO
 * PCI
 * MSRs
 * State dumping

Most of the functionality is fairly straight forward. There are some
quirks to support PCI enumerations since this is done in the TLB(!) in
the simulated CPUs. We currently replicate some of that code.

Unlike the ARM implementation, the x86 implementation of the virtual
CPU does not use the cycles hardware counter. KVM on x86 simulates the
time stamp counter (TSC) in the kernel. If we just measure host cycles
using perfevent, we might end up measuring a slightly different number
of cycles. If we don't get the cycle accounting right, we might end up
rewinding the TSC, with all kinds of chaos as a result.

An additional feature of the KVM CPU on x86 is extended state
dumping. This enables Python scripts controlling the simulator to
request dumping of a subset of the processor state. The following
methods are currenlty supported:

 * dumpFpuRegs
 * dumpIntRegs
 * dumpSpecRegs
 * dumpDebugRegs
 * dumpXCRs
 * dumpXSave
 * dumpVCpuEvents
 * dumpMSRs

Known limitations:
  * M5 ops are currently not supported.
  * FPU synchronization is not supported (only affects CPU switching).

Both of the limitations will be addressed in separate commits.
2013-09-25 12:24:26 +02:00
Andreas Hansson cecb951f60 swig: Warn on use of incompatible swig/gcc combinations
This patch removes the fixed swig warning concerning 2.0.9/2.0.10 and
adds a warning message for incompatible combinations of swig and gcc.
2013-09-18 08:46:32 -04:00
Andreas Hansson fdf6f6c4b6 scons: Enable build on OSX
This patch changes the SConscript to build gem5 with libc++ on OSX as
the conventional libstdc++ does not have the C++11 constructs that the
current code base makes use of (e.g. std::forward).

Since this was the last use of the transitional TR1, the unordered map
and set header can now be simplified as well.
2013-09-04 13:22:54 -04:00
Andreas Hansson 3ede4dceb8 scons: Use python-config instead of distutils
This patch changes how we determine the Python-related compiler and
linker flags. The previous approach used the internal LINKFORSHARED
which is not intended as part of the external API
(http://bugs.python.org/issue3588) and causes failures on recent OSX
installations.

Instead of using distutils we now rely on python-config and scons
ParseConfig. For backwards compatibility we also parse out the
includes and libs although this could safely be dropped. The drawback
of this patch is that Python 2.5 is now required, but hopefully that
is an acceptable compromise as any system with gcc 4.4 most likely
will have Python >= 2.5.
2013-07-18 08:29:28 -04:00
Ali Saidi 2b582ad9bb scons: ammend swig warning error to version 2.0.10 as well 2013-06-04 15:17:04 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg f156020158 kvm: Add basic support for ARM
Architecture specific limitations:
 * LPAE is currently not supported by gem5. We therefore panic if LPAE
   is enabled when returning to gem5.
 * The co-processor based interface to the architected timer is
   unsupported. We can't support this due to limitations in the KVM
   API on ARM.
 * M5 ops are currently not supported. This requires either a kernel
   hack or a memory mapped device that handles the guest<->m5
   interface.
2013-04-22 13:20:32 -04:00
Andreas Sandberg f485ad1908 kvm: Basic support for hardware virtualized CPUs
This changeset introduces the architecture independent parts required
to support KVM-accelerated CPUs. It introduces two new simulation
objects:

KvmVM -- The KVM VM is a component shared between all CPUs in a shared
         memory domain. It is typically instantiated as a child of the
         system object in the simulation hierarchy. It provides access
         to KVM VM specific interfaces.

BaseKvmCPU -- Abstract base class for all KVM-based CPUs. Architecture
	      dependent CPU implementations inherit from this class
	      and implement the following methods:

                * updateKvmState() -- Update the
                  architecture-dependent KVM state from the gem5
                  thread context associated with the CPU.

                * updateThreadContext() -- Update the thread context
                  from the architecture-dependent KVM state.

                * dump() -- Dump the KVM state using (optional).

	      In order to deliver interrupts to the guest, CPU
	      implementations typically override the tick() method and
	      check for, and deliver, interrupts prior to entering
	      KVM.

Hardware-virutalized CPU currently have the following limitations:
 * SE mode is not supported.
 * PC events are not supported.
 * Timing statistics are currently very limited. The current approach
   simply scales the host cycles with a user-configurable factor.
 * The simulated system must not contain any caches.
 * Since cycle counts are approximate, there is no way to request an
   exact number of cycles (or instructions) to be executed by the CPU.
 * Hardware virtualized CPUs and gem5 CPUs must not execute at the
   same time in the same simulator instance.
 * Only single-CPU systems can be simulated.
 * Remote GDB connections to the guest system are not supported.

Additionally, m5ops requires an architecture specific interface and
might not be supported.
2013-04-22 13:20:32 -04:00
Andreas Sandberg e28e6246fc scons: Try to use 'tcmalloc' before 'tcmalloc_minimal'
tcmalloc_minimal doesn't support the heap checker on Debian, while
tcmalloc does. Instead of always linking with tcmalloc_minimal, if it
exists, we first check for tcmalloc and then use tcmalloc_minimal as a
fallback.
2013-03-18 11:24:56 +01:00
Andreas Sandberg 468ad10f50 scons: Avoid malloc/free compiler optimization when using tcmalloc
According to the tcmalloc readme, the recommended way of compiling
applications that make use of tcmalloc is to disable compiler
optimizations that make assumptions about malloc and friends. This
changeset adds the necessary compiler flags for both gcc and clang.

From the tcmalloc readme:
"NOTE: When compiling with programs with gcc, that you plan to link
with libtcmalloc, it's safest to pass in the flags

 -fno-builtin-malloc -fno-builtin-calloc
 -fno-builtin-realloc -fno-builtin-free

when compiling."
2013-03-18 10:57:26 +01:00
Andreas Sandberg 9e9a47cb9a scons: Don't explicitly add tcmalloc_minimal to LIBS
SCons automatically adds a library to LIBS if conf.CheckLib succeeds,
so there is no need to explicitly add the library.
2013-03-18 10:44:34 +01:00
Andreas Sandberg 3e3475138b scons: Include flags required to link statically with Python
Python requires the flags in LINKFORSHARED to be added the linker
flags when linking with a statically with Python. Failing to do so can
lead to errors from the Python's dynamic module loader at start up.

--HG--
extra : rebase_source : e7a8daf72f4ede7ee5a4a5398a0b12e978a919b9
2013-03-18 10:22:21 +01:00
Andreas Sandberg 9544e8fbe0 scons: Check for known buggy version of SWIG (2.0.9)
SWIG version 2.0.9 uses fully qualified module names despite of the
importing module being in the same package as the imported
module. This has the unfortunate consequence of causing the following
error when importing m5.internal.event:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "src/python/importer.py", line 75, in load_module
    exec code in mod.__dict__
  File "src/python/m5/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
    import internal
  File "src/python/importer.py", line 75, in load_module
    exec code in mod.__dict__
  File "src/python/m5/internal/__init__.py", line 32, in <module>
    import event
  File "src/python/importer.py", line 75, in load_module
    exec code in mod.__dict__
  File "build/X86/python/swig/event.py", line 107, in <module>
    class Event(m5.internal.serialize.Serializable):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'internal'

When 'event' is loaded, it triggers 'serialize' to be loaded. However,
it seems like the dictionary of 'm5' isn't updated until after
__init__.py terminates, which means that 'event' never sees the
'internal' attribute on 'm5'. Older versions of SWIG didn't include
the fully qualified module name if the modules were in the same
package.
2013-03-14 16:08:55 +01:00
Andreas Hansson 08a5fd328b scons: Unify the flags shared by gcc and clang
This patch restructures and unifies the flags used by gcc and clang as
they are largely the same. The common parts are now dealt with in a
shared block of code, and the few bits and pieces that are
specifically affecting either gcc or clang are done separately.
2013-02-19 05:56:07 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 0acd2a96e5 scons: Add warning for overloaded virtual functions
A derived function with a different signature than a base class
function will result in the base class function of the same name being
hidden. The parameter list and return type for the member function in
the derived class must match those of the member function in the base
class, otherwise the function in the derived class will hide the
function in the base class and no polymorphic behaviour will occur.

This patch addresses these warnings by ensuring a unique function name
to avoid (unintentionally) hiding any functions.
2013-02-19 05:56:06 -05:00
Andreas Hansson d670fa60a1 scons: Add warning for missing field initializers
This patch adds a warning for missing field initializers for both gcc
and clang, and addresses the warnings that were generated.
2013-02-19 05:56:06 -05:00
Anthony Gutierrez ba983f9387 ext lib: add libfdt to enable flattened device tree support
this patch adds libfdt, a library necessary for supporting
flattened device tree support in current and future versions of
the linux/android kernel for ARM.
2013-02-15 18:48:59 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 62544f938a scons: Disable protobuf if pkg-config and CheckLib fails
This patch changes the use of pkg-config such that protobuf is still
evaluated with CheckLib even if it fails. This is to allow setups
where libprotobuf is available, but not configured through
protobuf. Moreover, if CheckLib fails to use libprotobuf then all the
tracing is disabled, but scons is allowed to continue with a warning.
2013-01-21 09:20:18 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 406891c62a scons: Enforce gcc >= 4.4 or clang >= 2.9 and c++0x support
This patch checks that the compiler in use is either gcc >= 4.4 or
clang >= 2.9. and enables building with --std=c++0x in all cases. As a
consequence, we can tidy up the hashmap and always have static_assert
available. If anyone wants to use alternative compilers, icc for
example supports c++0x to a similar level and could be added if
needed.

This patch opens up for a more elaborate use of c++0x features that
are present in gcc 4.4 and clang 2.9, e.g. auto typed variables,
variadic templates, rvalues and move semantics, and strongly typed
enums. There will be no going back on this one...
2013-01-07 13:05:39 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 221302335b scons: Remove stale compiler options
This patch simply prunes the SUNCC and ICC compiler options as they
are both sufficiently stale that they would have to be re-written from
scratch anyhow. The patch serves to clean things up before shifting to
a build environment that enforces basic c++11 compliance as done in
the following patch.
2013-01-07 13:05:39 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 4c06be60fc scons: Whitelist useful environment variables
Scons normally removes all environment variables that aren't
whitelisted from the build environment. This messes up things like
ccache, distcc, and the clang static analyzer. This changeset adds the
DISTCC_, CCACHE_, and CCC_ prefixes to the environment variable
whitelist.
2013-01-07 13:05:39 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 41f228c2ea scons: Add support for google protobuf building
This patch enables the use of protobuf input files in the build
process, thus allowing .proto files to be added to input. Each .proto
file is compiled using the protoc tool and the newly created C++
source is added to the list of sources.

The first location where the protobufs will be used is in the
capturing and replay of memory traces, involving the communication
monitor and the trace-generator state of the traffic generator. This
will follow in the next patch.

This patch does add a dependency on the availability of the BSD
licensed protobuf library (and headers), and the protobuf compiler,
protoc. These dependencies are checked in the SConstruct, similar to
e.g. swig. The user can override the use of protoc from the PATH by
specifying the PROTOC environment variable.

Although the dependency on libprotobuf and protoc might seem like a
big step, they add significant value to the project going
forward. Execution traces and other types of traces could easily be
added and parsers for C++ and Python are automatically generated. We
could also envision using protobufs for the checkpoints, description
of the traffic-generator behaviour etc. The sky is the limit. We could
also use the GzipOutputStream from the protobuf library instead of the
current GPL gzstream.

Currently, only the C++ source and header is generated. Going forward
we might want to add the Python output to support simple command-line
tools for displaying and editing the traces.
2013-01-07 13:05:37 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 4544f3def4 base: Check for static_assert support and provide fallback
C++11 has support for static_asserts to provide compile-time assertion
checking. This is very useful when testing, for example, structure
sizes to make sure that the compiler got the right alignment or vector
sizes.
2012-09-25 11:49:40 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 166afc43e0 Scons: Verbose messages when dependencies are not installed
This patch adds a few more checks to ensure that a compiler is present
on the system, along with swig. It references the relevant packages on
Ubuntu/RedHat, and also adds a similar line for the Python headers.
2012-09-21 10:11:22 -04:00
Andreas Hansson d1f3a3b91a gcc: Enable Link-Time Optimization for gcc >= 4.6
This patch adds Link-Time Optimization when building the fast target
using gcc >= 4.6, and adds a scons flag to disable it (-no-lto). No
check is performed to guarantee that the linker supports LTO and use
of the linker plugin, so the user has to ensure that binutils GNU ld
>= 2.21 or the gold linker is available. Typically, if gcc >= 4.6 is
available, the latter should not be a problem. Currently the LTO
option is only useful for gcc >= 4.6, due to the limited support on
clang and earlier versions of gcc. The intention is to also add
support for clang once the LTO integration matures.

The same number of jobs is used for the parallel phase of LTO as the
jobs specified on the scons command line, using the -flto=n flag that
was introduced with gcc 4.6. The gold linker also supports concurrent
and incremental linking, but this is not used at this point.

The compilation and linking time is increased by almost 50% on
average, although ARM seems to be particularly demanding with an
increase of almost 100%. Also beware when using this as gcc uses a
tremendous amount of memory and temp space in the process. You have
been warned.

After some careful consideration, and plenty discussions, the flag is
only added to the fast target, and the warning that was issued in an
earlier version of this patch is now removed. Similarly, the flag used
to enable LTO, now the default is to use it, and the flag has been
modified to disable LTO. The rationale behind this decision is that
opt is used for development, whereas fast is only used for long runs,
e.g. regressions or more elaborate experiments where the additional
compile and link time is amortized by a much larger run time.

When it comes to the return on investment, the regression seems to be
roughly 15% faster with LTO. For a bit more detail, I ran twolf on
ARM.fast, with three repeated runs, and they all finish within 42
minutes (+- 25 seconds) without LTO and 31 minutes (+- 25 seconds)
with LTO, i.e. LTO gives an impressive >25% speed-up for this case.

Without LTO (ARM.fast twolf)

real	42m37.632s
user	42m34.448s
sys	0m0.390s

real	41m51.793s
user	41m50.384s
sys	0m0.131s

real	41m45.491s
user	41m39.791s
sys	0m0.139s

With LTO (ARM.fast twolf)

real	30m33.588s
user	30m5.701s
sys	0m0.141s

real	31m27.791s
user	31m24.674s
sys	0m0.111s

real	31m25.500s
user	31m16.731s
sys	0m0.106s
2012-09-14 12:13:22 -04:00
Andreas Hansson 806a1144ce scons: Use c++0x with gcc >= 4.4 instead of 4.6
This patch shifts the version of gcc for which we enable c++0x from
4.6 to 4.4 The more long term plan is to see what the c++0x features
can bring and what level of support would be enabled simply by bumping
the required version of gcc from 4.3 to 4.4.

A few minor things had to be fixed in the code base, most notably the
choice of a hashmap implementation. In the Ruby Sequencer there were
also a few minor issues that gcc 4.4 was not too happy about.
2012-09-14 12:13:18 -04:00