[Barrelfish-users] ARM support in barrelfish

[Kornilios Kourtis]

Hi Zeus,

Thanks for your comments! I'm inlining some responses below.

On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 03:28:16PM +0000, Zeus Gómez Marmolejo wrote:
> Here at ARM we have been working with the ARMv7 and the Gem5 simulator,
> but we have found many problems. First, the Mercurial tip is not
> booting in Gem5.  There is currently a mixture between the pandaboard
> work done (that is working on physical memory 0x80000000) and the Gem5
> model (starting at 0).
>
> The last version that works on Gem5 is the latest revision from Samuel
> Hitz branch (revision 1081). But note that has to be compiled with a
> GCC version up or prior to 4.6.1 due to the inline bug of GCC, as
> Barrelfish code seems to have the 4.6.1 version harcoded in some
> headers (search for 'inline bug' in Barrelfish code). As far as I know,
> gcc 4.6.3 is affected by this bug too and is generating incorrect
> binaries, so this workaround should also include that version too.

We are aware of these issues, and they were the ones that (partially)
triggered sending the original mail. Unfortunately we haven't fixed them
due to limited bandwidth, but we hope to fix them soon.

> We agreed with Matt to have a Gem5 model of the pandaboard to unify
> platforms.  First because it would be useful for you as tests could be
> run both on Gem5 and pandaboard without any change, and second because
> the current Gem5 board that is being used is the Versatile Express ELT,
> which has been removed from recent versions of Gem5.

Having a gem5 pandaboard platform sounds very usefull (as is Matt's
suggestion of EMM). I'm not sure if it makes sense to have both or just
one (not sure how much overhead woud that add), but the current platform
seems not to be the best choice right now.

cheers,
Kornilios.

-- 
Kornilios Kourtis