Nate's Wish List

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Framework

  • Parallelize M5
    • Converting everything to support the new Params mechanism is a prerequisite
    • Make various global structures thread safe (e.g. Instruction cache, Statistics, etc.)
  • Unify full system and syscall emulation modes into a single build
  • Unify all ISAs into a single build
    • This requires fixes to the way endianness is handled in the memory system.
    • Add a NOISA option that doesn't have CPUs till this happens.
  • Modularize the build, allowing people to pick and choose which SimObjects get compiled in.
  • Make Python/C++ I/O systems work much better together. i.e. C++ can cprintf to python file objects, or Python can print to C++ iostreams.
  • Handle reading and writing of gzipped files
  • Make switching between CPU models way easier
  • Get simulations with > 100 cores working

CPU Models

  • Support something resembling direct execution using KVM.
  • Have a very fast model that dynamically compiles like PIN (or even use PIN).
  • Make a configurable in-order model
  • Make a very fast functional CPU model that doesn't have any stats or anything like that and is as fast as possible.
  • Clean up wakeup/sleeping/interrupts so the CPU models are more consistent and the interface isn't so horrendous.

Monitoring

  • Listen on a socket with cherrypy and allow people to browse and query the status of a simulation.

Configuration

  • Clean up SimObject.py significantly
  • Clean up configs/* and make it much more modular and library like
  • Make a top level DictParam that is like a VectorParam

Memory System

  • Clean up interrupt handling and route interrupts through the memory system as packets.
  • Implement something like SLICC for M5.
  • Implement the ARM instruction.
  • Add support to flush caches.

Disk Models

  • Support something like qemu's qcow2 disk image
    • This is actually bsd code, so we can steal it
    • Figure out how to mount it natively on linux so we don't have to convert back and forth to add stuff
  • Add host Linux file system support so the guest can easily access files on the host.
    • Maybe support the host side of vmhgfs since the guest side already exists and is GPL.
    • Now doable with 9p.

Disk Images

  • Just clean this stuff up
  • Figure out a replacement for ptxdist.
    • Currently think Gentoo is probably the best option.

Statistics

  • Make all stats types actually work.
  • Move lots of stats processing to python. Keep collection in C++, but all of the printing stuff should go to python.
  • Add a sqlite backend.
  • Clean up and better integrate the graphing stuff.

Ethernet

  • Add Ethernet overheads (preamble, trailer, inter frame gap) to EtherLink model.
  • Build and Ethernet switch model.
  • Get EtherTap working.
    • Keep the stuff that must run as root separate.