[PTLsim-devel] PTLsim revision 221 released

Thu Sep 13 20:28:16 EDT 2007

PTLsim Users:

We've released a new version of PTLsim, revision 221; the full changelog is 
given below.

IMPORTANT! The "ooo" core model has been removed from this release, since 
the "smt" model now works in both full system and userspace-only PTLsim. If 
you previously had custom code inside the ooo*.cpp files, you'll need to 
re-patch it into smt*.cpp (the two models were mostly the same anyway, since 
SMT is a strict superset of OOO).

We realize this name change may be disruptive, but it was too much of a burden 
to maintain two essentially identical sets of code, especially with the major 
changes (for MESI multi-core support) that will soon be appearing only in the 
SMT core.

In the next update, we'll rename smt*.cpp to ooo*.cpp to complete this change. 
Subversion should do this rename automatically (and back up your old code) 
for you.

This version makes some changes to the way the PTLCALL x86 instruction works, 
so you'll need to upgrade to the latest PTLsim-enabled Xen hypervisor version 
to use this.

We've also put up an updated Linux kernel (2.6.22, up from the older 2.6.20) 
and the rest of the Xen tools. As long as the hypervisor is updated, it's not 
strictly necessary that you also change your kernel and Xen tools version, 
but this is highly recommended, since we've added some new PTLsim-specific 
functionality to the kernel to help make checkpoints and control PTLsim 
(particularly from programs where you can't easily include ptlcalls.h or use 
custom instructions).

In addition, a disk image is available with scripts inside it to make creating 
checkpoints easier than before. These are all described on our download page:

https://ptlsim.org/download.php

You may also be interested in these instructions for making checkpoints:

https://ptlsim.org/capswiki/index.php/SPEC_2006

This is how our research group makes checkpoints for benchmark suites like 
SPEC cpu 2006 (as the page described), but you can use the same process for 
other benchmarks starting from the disk image available on the download page.

Thanks to everyone who's sent patches and bugfixes for this latest release - 
I've tried to incorporate most of your changes (with more coming soon).

Full changelog:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r221 | yourst | 2007-09-09 06:54:53 -0400 (Sun, 09 Sep 2007) | 42 lines

Major updates:

- Eliminated ooocore: we are phasing this out since smtcore now
  works in both full system and userspace modes

- mm: new physical address space ASIDs
- mm: fully deterministic physical address mappings
- mm: changed check_and_translate() semantics

- smtcore: re-enable prefetching

- seqcore: add event log ring buffer in lieu of textual logging

- uops: Renamed many FPU and vector uops for consistency
- uops: Added set.sub, set.and, sel.cmp, fmadd, fmsub, fmsubr
- microcode: SSE3 support and full SSE2 integer support
- microcode: Bugfix: some push/pop forms broken in 32-bit mode
- microcode: Bugfix: cmpxchg8b opcode fixed
- microcode: Bugfix: collcc not always injected correctly
- decoder: new method for splitting overlength BBs

- ptlmon: PTLsim hypervisor heap increased to 128 MB by default

- ptlxen: secondary VCPU bringup and suspend/resume rewritten

- ptlxen: PTLcall semantics changed: now ptlcall marker call
  is handled directly at hypervisor layer without switching
  to simulation

WARNING: The ptlcall instruction semantics have been modified
to provide better marker support. Make sure you're using an
up-to-date hypervisor and have recompiled any instrumented
benchmarks that use ptlcalls.h!

- patches: updated hypervisor and ptlcall kernel patches

- superstl: added FixedIntegerQueueSet
- superstl: added vectorized SearchableChunkList
- superstl: added search_sorted<> (binary search template)
- superstl: properly support >2GB large files

-------------------------------------------------------
 Matt T. Yourst                    yourst at peptidal.com
 Peptidal Research Inc., Co-Founder and Lead Architect
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