[Barrelfish-users] Barrelfish on ARM GEM5

[Timothy Roscoe]

It's a bit piecemeal at the moment, so it may be that starting afresh
targetting ARM 7A on GEM5 is the best way to go...

There are two ARM platforms that the Barrelfish code currently builds
for, with some degree of support:

 1) Orion's code is mostly unchanged (modulo bug fixes and
    commonalities with (2) below) and targets, I think, ARM11 under
    Qemu.  This is one of our continuous builds, and we run some unit
    tests against this all the time. 

 2) Bram Scheidegger's port to the ixp2850 on the Netronome i8000
    card, which is (hardwired to) opposite endian and so has
    "inconvenient" C compiler issues.  It also boots using a very
    different process, which Simon can say more about.  There is some
    documentation in Bram's bachelors thesis dissertation, which I'll
    but on the web site as soon as a I have a moment.  Bram gets as
    far as user space, I think, but with minimal device support. 

Plenty of other people can no doubt correct me...

 -- Mothy

At Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:57:50 +0000, "Tim Harris \(RESEARCH\)" <tharris at microsoft.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Following up on some discussion from last week's workshop...
> 
> We've been trying to understand what's needed to get Barrelfish up on ARM on the GEM5 simulator.
> 
> My previous work on GEM5 has all been x86-based (http://wiki.barrelfish.org/Running_on_gem5).
> 
> I guess a few initial questions are:
> 
> 
> -          What ARM architectures does Barrelfish support at the moment?  I remember Orion's original work, and I think some folk at ETHZ were looking at Netronome hardware... but I don't recall the details.  Is there a write-up somewhere online, or a particular existing h/w platform or simulator configuration that we can start from?
> 
> 
> -          Whether the devices modelled by ARM GEM5 match up with those expected by Barrelfish.  There may well be work to do on one or both sides of the system.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
>