- How do I ... ?
- Why don't I get the same number of
instructions/references/etc each time I run my program?
- Why don't the perl scripts work?
- What is instruction address compression?
- Whenever I try to run binaries, I always get the
error: "binary endian does not match host endian", what is
wrong?
- Why doesn't SimpleScalar compile on my machine?
- What's the deal with that "ssbig-na-sstrix-"
prefix?!?!?
- How rigorously has SIM-OUTORDER's performance been
verified? What kind of verification experiments have been done?
- Why doesn't DLite! work with sim-outorder?
- How does SimpleScalar exit simulation?
- Has SimpleScalar been ported to NT?
- How can I use the SimpleScalar 2.0 stats package
to print the contents of an array?
Look at the Hacker's Guide (available from SimpleScalar
Documentation page), if
your question is not answered in there, then look for your question in this
FAQ, if you don't find it there, then post a question to the SimpleScalar
mailing list (see this page for information of
the SimpleScalar mailing lists), if that does not work then e-mail the
SimpleScalar LLC development team at info@simplescalar.com.
It is very difficult to produce the same exact execution each time a
program executes on the SimpleScalar simulators. Many variations in any
particular execution are possible, including:
- calls to time() and getrusage() will produce different results
- redirecting output will cause subtle changes in printf() execution
- the size of your environment, which is imported into the simulated
virtual memory space, affects the starting location of a programs stack
pointer
- small variations in floating point across platforms can effect execution
Fortunately, all variations are very small, on the order of a few thousand
instructions at the most.
Perhaps you did not modify the first line of the script, change it to
indicate where your Perl executable is located.
Address compression (via the -icompress flag on sim-cache and
sim-outorder) linearly scales text reference addresses from the 64-bit
instruction domain to a comparable address produced by 32-bit instructions.
We support this option because the base SimpleScalar instruction set
definition does fit into a 32-bit encoding, but it has been encoded into
64-bits to ease modification and addition of new instructions. This option is
useful when unified cache levels are employed (without unified cache levels,
simply doubling the block size of the I-caches will have the same effect).
Your binaries are the wrong endian! Either you mis-configured GCC, GAS or
GLD, or you grabbed the wrong binary release. Reconfigure the compilers to
the opposite endian, or get the other binary release. To determine the endian
of your host machine, run "sysprobe -s", located in the
SimpleScalar simulator directory.
We may not have tested on your platform. Fortunately, the SimpleScalar
tool set it not difficult to port, you will likely only have to modify the
simulator file syscall.c. See the documentation in syscall.h and syscall.c
for details on porting the simulator.
That prefix follows the cross compiler naming format used by the GNU
compiler chain. The first prefix, "ssbig" or "sslittle"
signifies the architecture as big- or little-endian SimpleScalar,
respectively. The second part of the prefix "na" signifies the
manufacturer, i.e., not applicable. And the last prefix part, "sstrix",
designates the operations system, which we call SSTrix, a variant of Ultrix
for the SimpleScalar tool set.
There have been four approaches to validating the results produced by
SIM-OUTORDER:
- micro-benchmark validation, we've run a number of small programs to test
various parts of the machine, this is why release 2 has pipetrace support,
since this makes this process easier to perform
- correlation with independent simulators, we've done performance
validation with the multiscalar simulators, which were developed
independently over the SimpleScalar framework; when SIM-OUTORDER was
configured comparable to a dynamically scheduled stage processor, we found
comparable results, within 5% for SPEC92, we've also compared to other
published results, but this has been less productive, since SIM-OUTORDER
is more detailed than many of the other dynamically scheduled processor
simulators on which we have published numbers
- regression correlation, we've been careful to always run performance
regression simulation with previous versions of SIM-OUTORDER (config/regress.cfg
"dumbs down" release 2 SIM-OUTORDER to run like the release 1
SIM-OUTORDER), if there's any deviation we track it down and fix the
problem
- code inspections, many folks at Madison and other schools have
read the SIM-OUTORDER code to understand how it works, this has uncovered
occasional performance bugs, and it increases our confidence that the code
models a reasonably detailed microarchitecture correctly
In any event, always be vigilant of your results, if something does not
seem correct, identify the source of the surprise. If it is an
inaccuracy in a SimpleScalar model, please let us know and we will fix the
problem immediately.
Actually it does, but it takes a bit of practice to understand the output.
DLite! shows you the "view" of the program from the fetch stage of
the pipeline, as a result, if the fetch stage is stalled or mispredicting
into bogus memory, you'll see those "invalid memory" messages; step
the simulator a while and you'll see the instructions show up. The bottom
line: it's non-trivial to integrate a debugger with a pipeline simulator
since there are so many "views" of architected state depending on
which pipestage you examine state from. The most valuable aspects of the
sim-outorder DLite! debugger are the "mstate" commands which allow
one to probe all of the state in the pipeline. Check them out with "mstate
help".
When an exit() system call occurs (implemented in syscall.c), the
implementing code makes a longjmp() to the point in main() where setjmp() was
called. That setjmp() covers a small piece of code that computes total
runtime and then it calls a stats function that dumps final statistics,
finally the simulator terminates by calling exit() for real.
Yes, the simulators and binutils from release 2 builds (and passes self
test) on NT with the Cygwin32 GNU tools. I have not tried building GCC for
SimpleScalar, however.
>From README.winnt: -- Starting in release 2.0, the simulators build
under x86/WinNT. To build them, however, you will need the following:
- Cygnus' cygwin32 GNU tool chain release, available from: ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/
- little-endian program binaries, since the SimpleScalar GNU GCC/GAS/GLD
ports have not been re-hosted to WinNT (yet), either build the binaries on
another little-endian supported platform, or grab them from the binaries
release available from the same place you found this package.
Then, follow the install instructions in the README file. There are
still some minor problems with this port; specifically, some of the system
calls made by SimpleScalar binaries have no obvious counterparts under WinNT
(e.g., getrusage()), when these system calls are made, a warning is printed.
More testing is needed, please send us any bugs/fixes that you find if you
use this port.
Steve Reinhardt ported the simulators to the WinNT/Cygnus environment.
Use stat_reg_dist() to register an array that the stats package will
print. Unlike the scalar stats, the stats package will allocate the array,
and you should update the elements of the array using the stat_add_sample()
and stat_add_samples() functions. Sparse arrays can also be made with
stat_reg_sdist(). Look at stats.h for documentation regarding the interfaces,
and see sim-profile.c for examples of how to use these functions. I
believe that module uses just about every kind of scalar and array stat.
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