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The elastic trace is a type of probe listener and listens to probe points in multiple stages of the O3CPU. The notify method is called on a probe point typically when an instruction successfully progresses through that stage. As different listener methods mapped to the different probe points execute, relevant information about the instruction, e.g. timestamps and register accesses, are captured and stored in temporary InstExecInfo class objects. When the instruction progresses through the commit stage, the timing and the dependency information about the instruction is finalised and encapsulated in a struct called TraceInfo. TraceInfo objects are collected in a list instead of writing them out to the trace file one a time. This is required as the trace is processed in chunks to evaluate order dependencies and computational delay in case an instruction does not have any register dependencies. By this we achieve a simpler algorithm during replay because every record in the trace can be hooked onto a record in its past. The instruction dependency trace is written out as a protobuf format file. A second trace containing fetch requests at absolute timestamps is written to a separate protobuf format file. If the instruction is not executed then it is not added to the trace. The code checks if the instruction had a fault, if it predicated false and thus previous register values were restored or if it was a load/store that did not have a request (e.g. when the size of the request is zero). In all these cases the instruction is set as executed by the Execute stage and is picked up by the commit probe listener. But a request is not issued and registers are not written. So practically, skipping these should not hurt the dependency modelling. If squashing results in squashing younger instructions, it may happen that the squash probe discards the inst and removes it from the temporary store but execute stage deals with the instruction in the next cycle which results in the execute probe seeing this inst as 'new' inst. A sequence number of the last processed trace record is used to trap these cases and not add to the temporary store. The elastic instruction trace and fetch request trace can be read in and played back by the TraceCPU.
This is the gem5 simulator. The main website can be found at http://www.gem5.org A good starting point is http://www.gem5.org/Introduction, and for more information about building the simulator and getting started please see http://www.gem5.org/Documentation and http://www.gem5.org/Tutorials. To build gem5, you will need the following software: g++ or clang, Python (gem5 links in the Python interpreter), SCons, SWIG, zlib, m4, and lastly protobuf if you want trace capture and playback support. Please see http://www.gem5.org/Dependencies for more details concerning the minimum versions of the aforementioned tools. Once you have all dependencies resolved, type 'scons build/<ARCH>/gem5.opt' where ARCH is one of ALPHA, ARM, NULL, MIPS, POWER, SPARC, or X86. This will build an optimized version of the gem5 binary (gem5.opt) for the the specified architecture. See http://www.gem5.org/Build_System for more details and options. With the simulator built, have a look at http://www.gem5.org/Running_gem5 for more information on how to use gem5. The basic source release includes these subdirectories: - configs: example simulation configuration scripts - ext: less-common external packages needed to build gem5 - src: source code of the gem5 simulator - system: source for some optional system software for simulated systems - tests: regression tests - util: useful utility programs and files To run full-system simulations, you will need compiled system firmware (console and PALcode for Alpha), kernel binaries and one or more disk images. Please see the gem5 download page for these items at http://www.gem5.org/Download If you have questions, please send mail to gem5-users@gem5.org Enjoy using gem5 and please share your modifications and extensions.