A grad school class project using gem5 to compare the performance of various branch predictors.
Dependencies: Just git and docker!
Simply run ./build.sh to build a (rather large) development image.
This long build time (15-30 minutes) only needs to happen once, and later builds will be much faster.
This produces an image called gem5-dev that you can run run.sh as described below.
If you want to start a shell inside the container to investigate after a build, run docker run --rm -it gem5-dev:RISCV bash.
You probably won't need to do this often.
If you want to use a different architecture, run ./build.sh -a ARM or ./build.sh -a X86.
Then use that architecture after the colon in the docker run command above.
Building for different architectures will not overwrite each other.
After building, use run.sh to automatically handle making input files available to the container and output files available to the host.
Use the script name and container name in place of gem5, so gem5 --help becomes ./run.sh gem5-dev:RISCV --help.
Here's an example command:
./run.sh gem5-dev:RISCV configs/learning_gem5/part1/simple.py
Results and statistics from a run are stored in ./m5out in your current directory.
The current directory when you run ./gem5.sh is mounted into /opt inside the container, so you must use relative paths for files.
(Specify the config file with a path that does not start with /.)
This repo contains tests and configs directories that were originally copied from gem5 v21.2.0.0.
They are required to run the above example command.
The contents of the gem5 directory is copied into the gem5 repository inside the container before starting the second incremental build.
This means that any files or directories you add or change inside there will be additions or changes to the full gem5 source code.
After making a change, just run ./build.sh again and the image will rebuild to reflect that change.
The most recent build for some architecture (ARCH) is always what you get when you use the gem5-dev:ARCH image.
The gem5-dev:* images are large (at least 5GB) because they include many development-specific packages that are not needed at runtime.
They also contain many *.o files and other intermediates that are helpful in speeding up later builds, but are not used at runtime.
To export an image that does not include these things, run ./build.sh -x.
This produces a (much) smaller gem5:* image rather than a gem5-dev:* image.
As always, you can specify ARM or X86 with the -a flag.
You can also download a precompiled image with docker pull gabrielkulp/gem5:RISCV, :ARM, or :X86.
You can upload your own with ./build.sh -u USER, where USER is your Dockerhub username.