Re: Re: Speed up Linux Development Cycle By Using a Simulator

Rayson Ho (ut_bookstore@yahoo.com)
Fri, 9 Apr 1999 16:00:31 -0700 (PDT)


The nice thing about SimOS is that you can modify the
level of detail that you want. ( I think there are 3
currently) So that means that you can boot up your
kernel under the simulator and collect the information
about the kernel when it actually runs applications
(Yes, you can change the level when the simulator is
running or even save the state!).

One more nice thing is that it can simulate
multi-processor systems on a uni-processor machine.
Moreover, it can communicate with other machine over a
reak network, so that means we can find better
algorithms for the Beowulf project.

One bad thing about it is that it is slow, but if we
don't want very detail information, the current
version of SimOS can execute the instructions only
several times slower. On the other extreme, if we want
to want if the instructions are pairable, if they
execute smoothly on a pipeline or do they cause cache
misses or not, then it can be hundreds to thousands
time slower than executing on the same processor
natively.

> People have used this for linux-mips. Right now it's
> way too low to
> be useful... also, I suspect simulator won't show up
> timing related
> bugs and various race conditions which are probably
> some of the
> hardest things to get right...

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