Discussion:
[gem5-users] Arm platform deprecation
Andreas Sandberg
2018-09-06 10:24:07 UTC
Permalink
Hi Everyone,

Those of you using gem5 to simulate Arm systems probably know that gem5
supports a handful of different Arm platforms (memory & interrupt maps).
Some of these platforms are very old and most of them aren't supported
by the kernel default configurations in gem5's Linux tree [1]. In the
short term, we would like to deprecate and remove the RealViewEB
platform [2]. In the medium term, I would also like to deprecate
RealViewPBX and in the long term we might consider deprecating
VExpress_EMM(64).

To give some background, the source tree currently has ships with the
following platforms:

RealViewPBX: RealView Platform Baseboard Explore for Cortex-A (32-bit
only, pre-kernels 4.x kernels)
RealViewEB: RealView Emulation Baseboard (32-bit only, pre-kernels 4.x
kernels)
VExpress_EMM: Versatile Express Baseboard (32-bit only, device tree
required, pre-kernels 4.x kernels)
VExpress_EMM64: Versatile Express Baseboard (64-bit only, device tree
required, pre-kernels 4.x kernels)
VExpress_GEM5_V1: gem5-specific Versatile Express like platform (64 & 32
bit, device tree auto-generation, 4.x+ kernels)

Of these platforms, only VExpress_GEM5_V1 supports new kernels and
device tree auto-generation. The older platforms have known functional
bugs (mainly in the PCI related) that can't be fixed without breaking
backwards compatibility and should only be used to support existing
experiments that use old software.

If you have any concerns about these deprecation plans, please raise
your concerns in this thread or on the relevant code review [2].

Thanks,
Andreas

[1] https://gem5.googlesource.com/arm/linux/
[2] https://gem5-review.googlesource.com/c/public/gem5/+/12471

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