=A9 Qemu=
I've spent most of the week looking at QEmu emulation of SMP A9. The
model (of a realview-pbx-a9) doesn't have any working block IO;
I spent some time looking at trying to get SD working and got part
way, but I fell back to using NFS root.
It seems to work OK for basic CPU emulation, and SMP 'works' in the
sense that the guest sees multiple CPUs;
however QEmu is restricted to only using one host CPU core for
multiple guest CPUs, so it's of limited
help in debugging SMP code.
Video doesn't seem to work either.
To get to that point it does need a bunch of patches to QEmu, most of
which Peter Maydell already knows of;
I've put some notes here :
https://wiki.linaro.org/Internal/People/DaveGilbert/QEMUA9SMP
Note that the realview-pbx doesn't currently have a Linaro hardware
pack; I used a kernel from ARMs website
and a 2.6.37 I built myself.
=SPEC=
SPEC ref got quite a far way through on Canis (with half-duplex
ether), however 'lbm' failed when running
in ref mode (while having worked in test and train) giving a different
output; it takes quite a long time to fail.
= Perf =
I sent an updated version of my patch for perf's thumb annotation upstream.
and apparently we have a Panda on the way.
Dave
RAG:
Red:
Amber:
Green:
Current Milestones:
| Planned | Estimate | Actual |
finish qemu-cont-integration | 2010-01-25 | 2010-01-25 | handed off |
first qemu-linaro release | 2011-01-11 | 2011-01-11 | |
Historical Milestones:
finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | |
finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 |
successful ARM qemu pull req | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 |
* submitted meego patch upstream to print instruction
boundaries in TCG op-level debug dumps:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/79298/
* reviewed a couple of patches by Christophe Lyon from ST
which fix some problems with VMULL and friends
(together with a qemu-meego patch in the same area)
* lots of rebasing work to get a qemu-linaro tree into
shape. Mostly putting together my exploded set of
ARM patches from the meego tree with a rebased set
of omap patches. I have something which I think is about
right but I need to test it.
* patches submitted to qemu upstream:
+ add -version option to qemu-user:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/79635/
+ fix writing default vector address in PL190:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/79712/
+ print instruction boundaries in TCG op-level debug dumps:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/79298/
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences:
17/18 March: QEMU Users Forum, Grenoble
Holiday: 22 Apr - 2 May
I had a few spare cycles this afternoon on my A9 board so I got it to
build and run 72 variants of CoreMark with the 2011.01 compiler. The
results are here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/MichaelHope/Sandbox/CoreMark1
I haven't looked deeply into it and the usual disclaimer about
benchmarks applies, but there's some interesting stuff there. The ARM
to Thumb-2 drop is more than expected. Tuning for Cortex-A9 generally
makes things worse.
-- Michael
Hi,
One of the things that came up in yesterday's chat was about ARM vs
Thumb2. If some folks are interested in a high level overview that
doesn't go into too many details with respect to the ISA that I know a
compiler writer will be interested in you could read this presentation
unless you've seen it. At the minute the canonical way of figuring out
more about Thumb2 is really to read the ARM-ARM.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/M/ARMGeneralArchitectureOverview?action=Attac…
This was a presentation that Dave Rusling gave at the UDS in Belgium
last year, it roughly covers the architecture at a high level and
talks about Thumb2 vs ARM , why Thumb2 , the evolution of the ARM
architecture etc. It's not a lot of detail but quite a high level overview.
HTH
cheers
Ramana
Hi,
* finished SLP for reduction patch. The loop in DenBench that needs
this feature also requires support of load permutation. I am
considering to implement that too. I looked for other occasions that
need this feature, but only found loops that are not vectorizable. So,
I am not sure I'll proceed in this direction.
* looked into extract_even/odd and interleave_high/low implementation
on ARM as a backup plan for the case we don't have special load/store
support on time for the next release. Even though NEON VZIP and VUZP
instructions can perform both even and odd (and high and low)
computations simultaneously, I don't see how we can express that at
the tree level.
* looking into ffmpeg
* non-Linaro issues
Ira
Hi ,
So rather than manually backporting a patch from upstream "trunk" I
decided to try using bzr for this yesterday. Even though this was a
slow process and thanks to some help from Michael on IRC last night I
think I got it right finally. However I can't get bzr visualize to
show me the revision history correctly with the merge from the
upstream repository.
So what I did was to do the following
bzr branch 4.5 new-branch
cd new-branch
bzr merge -c XXX lp:gcc where XXX is the bzr revision number of the
svn commit that I'm tracking upstream.
gcc/Changelog merge fails - there is a conflict. Expected because you
are merging trunk's gcc/Changelog into a version of the Changelog file
in our tree
Thus I reverted changes that were brought in by copying in a backup of
gcc/Changelog that I had made before the merge
bzr resolved gcc/Changelog
edit Changelog.linaro
Add changelog entry
bzr commit
bzr push lp:gcc private repository
Create merge request upstream.
Does this look sensible to people or do folks follow other recipes?
cheers
Ramana
Hi there. I've cancelled Monday's meeting as the CodeSourcery people
are at their annual meeting and others are travelling back from the
sprint. Please come to the Wednesday stand up call if you are
available.
-- Michael
Got a complete run of SPEC Train on Orion board - all working.
Kicked off a SPEC ref run - canis1 died.
Gathered a full set of 'perf record's for all of SPEC on silverbell;
and had a quick look through them;
there aren't too many surprises; a few things that might be worth a
look at though.
(Not as much using libc functions as I hoped).
There are some odd bits - chunks of samples landing apparently outside libraries
that aren't obvious what's going on.
Sent tentative patch for Thumb perf annotate issue (bug 677547) to
lkml for comments.
Started on libffi variadic fixing.
Caught the qemu pbx-a9 testing from PM; got qemu built and getting a
handful of lines of output
both from a kernel from arm.com's site and a linaro-2.6.37 that I built for it.
Dave
RAG:
Red:
Amber:
Green: issues I wanted to nail at this sprint all handled;
a couple of blueprints handed off to other people
Milestones:
| Planned | Estimate | Actual |
finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | |
finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 |
successful ARM qemu pull req | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 |
finish qemu-cont-integration | 2010-01-25 | 2010-01-25 | |
At the Linaro/Ubuntu sprint/rally in Dallas this week
* qemu-continuous-integration
** spoke to Paul Larson (in Linaro Validation team) and
handed this blueprint off to him (with a clarification
of the requirements from qemu's point of view)
* maintain-beagle-models
** we've agreed to start doing official "Linaro Qemu"
releases which are essentially going to be the meego
tree plus point fixes for things. These will be every
month with the rest of the toolchain group releases.
Ubuntu will also take these releases to replace the
current use of the qemu-kvm tree to provide ARM models
* verify-a9-pbx-support
** this blueprint has been handed off to David Gilbert
* merge-correctness-fixes
** wrote and posted patches:
*** to restore IT bits after unexpected exceptions
(including fix of Linux usermode bug where it wasn't
clearing the IT bits when entering a signal handler)
*** to include opcode hex in disassembly of ARM insns
*** fixing a compile failure for a previous change when
the host linux system didn't have linux/fiemap.h
** I have managed to split the huge "lots of ARM TCG fixes"
commit in the meego tree up into 65 more self-contained
commits. These now need reordering and possibly some
may be recombined.
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences:
2011: Holiday 21 Jan, 22 Apr - 2 May.
