We announce the release of a new version of ReSP, providing a new, polished build system and a whole set of new features, among which:
- OS Emulation: the OS emulation layer has been completely rewritten. Now it is possible to write programs and compile them with any elf cross-compiler, using a standard POSIX interface (with the included linker and init scripts). Any OS and library function can be trapped by the simulator and executed natively: a set of these functions is included (open, close, printf, etc.) and others can be added both in C++ and Python with a simple interface. It also includes support for environment variables
- Multi-processor and multi-threading emulation: a full set of POSIX threads primitives and OpenMP support through GCC 4.2 are available for testing multi-threaded programs. Scheduling, locking, mutexes, barriers… all the necessary primitives are implemented in the OS emulation, and multi-threaded programs can be run and profiled in ReSP without the need of an OS, allowing powerful design-space exploration (even library access is reentrant!). At the moment this is fully supported only for the ARM processor (partially for the LEON2 processor).
- eCos SMP support: now eCos is fully supported and can run in SMP mode on a multi-processor ReSP model. All the SPLASH2 benchmarks are running. A precompiled eCos BSP is provided for the ARM processor.
- New improved support for cross-compilation: compilers do not need to be patched, and single sources can be compiled simultaneously across several architectures (sparc, arm, powerpc, etc.)
- A new bootloader, based on the GNU BFD library, capable of parsing any ELF file, detecting and manipulating any symbol
- 64bit OS support: ReSP now runs on 64bit Linux machines
- A new socket-based ReSP HCI (Human-Computer Interface): resp can be controlled via sockets with a protocol similar to the one used by GDB. This could be useful for GUIs, scripting, etc. Sample client tests and a protocol API are provided
- A new cycle approximate ARM model, with error < 1%
- Many new benchmarks and tests, including OpenMP (OmpSCR, Intel, and Microbench) and pthread based ones (from Parallel Computing Book)
- New multi-processor pre-compiled platforms
- Accurate simulation-time estimation accessible from software programs (for printing elapsed times from software, etc.)
- Many, many bugfixes
ReSP should work on any recent Linux machine with the Boost libraries 1.33.1 and python 2.4 or 2.5. It was tested on Gentoo and Ubuntu Linux. The source code for resp-0.3.0 is available on our development server (under Downloader) or it can be downloaded here.
Note that to run resp on Ubuntu, the following packages are required:
libboost-python*
libboost-thread*
libboost-program-options*
Also the -dev packages have to be installed.
