A week in M5

I spent the last week or so playing around with a relatively new simulator called M5.  It is a very nice simulator, especially for architectural research.  My interest in it is to use it for doing both operating system and architecture research.  This type of research is difficult to do with most simulators, because fully functional simulators rarely provide accurate timing to evaluate overheads, while timing simulators rarely provide sufficient functionality to run an operating system.  What is needed is a full system simulator that provides fidelity for both functionality and timing.

In the past our research group has used SimpleScalar for architectural research.  However, that project is obsolete and the simulator is slowly becoming obsolete with respect to real-world systems.  Also, it does not provide full system simulation, although a set of patches by Jack Whitham merges RTEMS and SimpleScalar to provide full system simulation for RTEMS.  I tried to use Jack's patches, but I could not quite get everything working.  When I sent him an e-mail to ask about it, he suggested that I should look at M5 as a more realistic simulator instead.  So I did.

M5 provides two types of simulators: Full System (FS) and Syscall Emulation (SE).

vim Productivity

I use vim.  Not because I think it is inherently superior to emacs or any other full-featured editor/IDE, but because I learned it first.  A fellow vim user and friend of mine tried emacs out for about a semester+ and his experience was that they are roughly equivalent after learning how to use each, so I stick with vim.  The only real difference between the two is the command syntax

Through working on various projects, I have gathered a few tricks, tips, and features to improve my productivity while using vim.  The rest of this post is a semi-tutorial and repository of my vim usage.

Built-ins:

• .vimrc
• Modes
• Cut-Paste
• Find-Replace
• Jumping Around 
• Split
• Auto-Format 
• Shell commands

Plug-ins:

• Latex-suite
• Cscope
• changelog