Hi Dan, Thanks for your willingness to work on the SPARC support. There actually is support for SPARC full-system mode; there's even a regression test that gets run with:
scons build/SPARC/tests/opt/long/fs/80.solaris-boot/sparc/solaris/t1000-simple-atomic Unfortunately that test relies on a non-redistributable Solaris boot image that we have at Michigan, so it doesn't normally get run outside of our nightly regressions there. As a result, I wouldn't have any confidence that anything beyond that simple boot test still works :). As we said when this topic came up earlier, it would be great to have a non-propietary SPARC boot image, and if someone were to put that together, we would be glad to incorporate it in our regressions. As far as where to get started, I don't have a lot of specific pointers. I'd say start by figuring out what environment you want to run, then set up a disk image and a kernel (note that we load the kernel directly, not off the disk image). Between the existing SPARC support and the FS support for other ISAs, I'd hope you'd have enough clues to figure out how to put that together. Then fire it up and see how far you get... mostly it's a matter of seeing where it breaks, fixing up the first problem you run into, then seeing what the next bug is. Eventually you've fixed the last bug, and off you go... Hope that helps! Please keep us all posted on your progress. I hope other SPARC users are able to speak up and help you out as well. Steve On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 6:04 AM Danny Walters <[email protected]> wrote: > I’d like to use gem5 to simulate a bare-metal program running on a LEON3 (a > 32-bit SPARC v8 processor). Running this on the currently supported > UltraSPARC T1 should work fine since the two processors are binary > compatible, however it seems like gem5 only currently supports syscall > emulation mode (on a good day) and not bare-metal. > > > > I’ve read some of the threads regarding SPARC support over the past year > (including the one where it was debated whether support should be dropped > entirely because it’s so unlikely that anyone will ever in the future want > to run gem with SPARC again… I found that one pretty funny) – so I get that > there isn’t much being done there. But… by the way.. SPARC isn’t dead… > as Steve had mentioned in a previous post, the open-source LEON design is > alive and well and I’m aware of several projects that use it. > > > > I’d be willing to dedicate some effort to contribute to the project to get > some form of bare-metal support working, but I need some help to get > started. Shouldn’t need too much hand-holding, but can anyone at least > point me in the right direction? > > > > Thanks, > > Dan > _______________________________________________ > gem5-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
