TutorialScratchPad

• Introduction to gem5 (15-20 minutes: 10 slides)
  • Presentation by: TBD
  • Tutorial Goals and Timeline
  • High-level view of the gem5:
    • What’s new?
    • The "best" parts of Ruby
    • The "best" parts of M5
  • Discuss goals, design principles, etc.
    • Basically review the high-level points of the CAN article
  • gem5 Basics
    • File Hierarchy
    • Run Scripts (?)
    • SE Mode v. FS Mode - Basic Building / Runinng
    • Atomic v. Timing
    • Stats
    • Debugging Tools (debug-flags)
• Multiple ISA support (45 minutes: ? slides)
  • Presentation by: ARM - Ali & x86 - Gabe
  • ISA description language
    • Review high-level concepts and what is new versus the past tutorial
    • We probably don’t have enough time to discuss a lot of implementation
  • ARM Implementation Key Points
  • x86 Key Points
  • Example: From Memory to Decode to an Instruction (BaseDynInst)???
• CPU Models (30 minutes: ? slides)
  • Key Interfaces:
    • ISA
    • Ports/Memory
  • SimpleCPU Overview
  • Detailed CPU Commonalities: TimeBuffer Communication & ThreadContext
  • O3CPU – Pipeline Stages and Resources Description
  • InOrder CPU - "Medium" Level
    • Example: Moving Through the InOrder Model???
• Break - 20 mins
• Ruby (50 minutes: ~25 slides)
  • Presentation by: Brad
  • Discuss design concepts
    • Separation of policies
    • Rich configurability
    • Rapid prototyping
  • Components – highlighting differences from GEMS
    • Coherence protocols
    • Highlight local variables & input parameters to SLICC files
  • Protocol independent structures
  • Topology & networks
    • Topology Spec. Basics?
    • Simple Network?
    • Garnet?
  • Example: Life of a Ruby Request
• Checkpoint and fast-forwarding (25 minutes: ? slides)
  • Presented by: Joel
  • Brief description then demo
    • Where are checkpoints generated?
    • What are the key functions used to create/read a checkpoint?
    • What are the command line options to use?
    • DEMO
• Debugging Infrastucture
  • Debug flags
    • user/kernel tracing
    • tracediff
    • gdb helper
    • Ref counting pointers?
• Conclusions & questions (20 minutes: 5 slides)
  • Status Matrix
  • Developer tools
    • Regression tester
    • Code reviews
    • Mailing list (shouldn’t we mention this in the Introduction? Having an active mailing list is like a feature :) … )
• Future Work/In Development (? mins, : ? slides)
  • Highlight the different development efforts
    • Prelude to the development discussion in the afternoon
    • What are near-term/long-term plans for each major bullet point above?
  • Invite attendees to speak up and start to form "birds of feather" groupings for 2nd half of tutorial