Nate's Wish List

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.