gem5-21.2 Released!

We are proud to announce version 21.2 of the the gem5 project. In this release we incorporated 790 commits from 33 unique authors, new and regular, from both academia and industry. We are, as always, thankful to all the time our community puts into maintaining and improving gem5.

21.2 Highlights

Enhanced Standard Library

Having existed since v21.1 under the now deprecated name “the components library”, the v21.2 release of gem5 moves the gem5 standard library out of alpha. The purpose of the gem5 standard library is to provide gem5 users a standard set of commonly used components and utilities to aid them in their research. Our overarching goal with the standard library is to remove “boilerplate” code from gem5 configuration files; making the 95% of activities that rarely change from simulation-to-simulation available in an “off-the-shelf” manner to users. As an example, a users wishing to experiment with the effects of cache sizes can used the gem5 standard library to setup a processor, memory system, and test on sensible benchmarks, thus freeing them to focus completely on the impact of cache size changes.

The gem5 standard library is a provided as Python package which contains the following:

Note: Usage of the gem5 standard library is optional. It does not change any established gem5 API, or how gem5 configuration scripts may be created. gem5 configuration scripts that functioned in v21.1 should continue to function in v21.2. We do, however, hope the gem5 library can aid users in creating simulations, as is the case with all libraries.

Users can find example configurations scripts that incorporate the gem5 standard library in the gem5 repository’s configs/example/gem5_library directory.

As an example of how simple the gem5 standard library can make running a gem5 simulation, consider the following script:

from gem5.prebuilt.demo.x86_demo_board import X86DemoBoard
from gem5.resources.resource import Resources
from gem5.simulate.simulator import Simulators

# Here we setup the board. The prebuilt X86DemoBoard allows for Full-System X86
# simulation.
board = X86DemoBoard()

# We then set the workload. Here we use the 5.4.49 Linux kernel with an X86
# Ubuntu OS. If these cannot be found locally they will be automatically
# downloaded.
board.set_kernel_disk_workload(
    kernel=Resource("x86-linux-kernel-5.4.49"),
    disk_image=Resource("x86-ubuntu-18.04-img"),
)

# We then setup the Simulator and run the simulation.
simulator = Simulator(board=board)
simulator.run()

This script can be executed with

scons build/X86/gem5.opt
./build/X86/gem5.opt <script>

The script will automatically obtain the correct linux kernel and a disk image containing Ubuntu 18.04 from gem5-resources (if not already present on the host system). It will then run a full-system X86 simulation to a complete boot of the operating system, then exit. Prior to the introduction of the gem5 standard library, a user would have to put in considerable effort to build such a simulation (100s of lines of python).

While we hope we have designed the standard library in an intuitive manner, users may reference the source under src/python/gem5.

In the coming month we will be updating the gem5 website with new tutorials and documentation on using the gem5 standard library.

Future work on the gem5 standard library

Over the next few gem5 releases we will be expanding the standard library to include more components and features. An big goal of ours is to provide prebuilt components and systems that are proven to be representative of real-world counterparts.

The Simulate module will be expanded, improved, and moved out of beta state as its role in the gem5 standard library becomes more clear.

If you wish to report a bug in the gem5 standard library or have a feature request, please submit it to gem5’s Jira site. Questions regarding usage of the standard library can be made to the gem5 user’s mailing list.

LupIO: Friendly IO Devices for gem5.

LupIO devices were developed by Prof. Joel Porquet-Lupine as a set of open-source I/O devices to be used for teaching. They were designed to model a complete set of I/O devices that are neither too complex to teach in a classroom setting, or too simple to translate to understanding real-world devices. A goal of two undergraduate students at UC Davis, Melissa Jost and Laura Hinman, was to work on incorporating LupIO devices into gem5. As such the gem5 v21.2 release includes a LupIO real-time clock, a random number generator, a terminal device, a block device, a system controller, a timer device, a programmable interrupt controller, and an inter-processor interrupt controller.

A more detailed outline of LupIO can be found in Prof. Porquet-Lupine’s paper “LupIO: a collection fo education-friendly I/O devices” and information on the wider LupLab research group can be found on their website.

Users wishing to try out LupIO devices can find an example script and README file in the configs/example/lupv directory.

Note: These LupIO devices have been built and tested for RISC-V. However, there is no reason these couldn’t be modified to work with other ISA targets if required or desired. We welcome further development by the gem5 community.

Arm improvements

In continued and welcome collaboration with Arm Holdings, improvements to gem5 Arm implementations have been made. They are:

GPU Improvements

Continued efforts by, primarily, AMD, Inc. and the University of Wisconsin have improved gem5’s GPU support. In this release:

gem5-SST bridge revived

In recent versions of gem5, we sadly lost the ability to integrate with the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST). In collaboration with the SST community, we have revived support for connecting gem5 cores to the SST memory system. In v21.2 release, this has been tested for RISC-V and Arm. More information on setting up and running gem5 with SST can be found in ext/sst/README.md.

New/Changed APIS

Other v21.2 improvements