[Gems-users] Gems Questions

["Fuad Tabba" <fuad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Was wondering if anyone could help me with any of the following:-

- Are SIMICS_BEGIN_BARRIER or SIMICS_END_BARRIER important for a simulation to run properly? Or are they just used for giving better tracing information. By inspecting commands.C it seems to me that they're only used for visualization, but without them LogTM acts up!

- I found that disabling interrupts on the running processors (using psrset -f) helps with the simulation running smoother.  Is there good reason why I should *not* be doing that?

- I couldn't find a difference between using processor_bind or
pset_bind. Looking at the man pages they seem to do the same thing. I
prefer processor_bind because it doesn't require root access, so I can
use it on the real sparc machine I run the software benchmarks on
without having to go through the hassle of asking for the right
privileges. Is there a reason why creating cabinets and binding them with pset_bind is
preferable?

- Is there a way to unload ruby? Or at least speed it up (while sacrificing statistics or something)? The reason I'm asking is that after running the benchmarks I normally like to run some sanity checks and collect statistics from the data structures. This step takes place on only one processor, and I don't have any need for the ruby features at that point. Currently this step takes a lot of time (almost 25%). Is there a way I could speed it up?

Cheers,
/Fuad