摘要:
This thesis documents the implementation of a multiprocessor extension to a Sim- plescalar based full system simulator. The new multiprocessor simulator, called sim- smp, is able to run the Linux operating system, v2.4. xx, along with applications on top of itself. The architecture modeled by sim-smp is essentially MIPS32, due to the fact that the underlying Simplescalar simulator models a subset of the MIPS architecture. The mi- cro architecture modeled is a Symmetric Multiprocessor with shared level one caches, that maintain the MESI cache coherency protocol, and a unified level two cache. The simulator can be modified to collect a wide variety of statistics, and does by default collect statistics on caches, cache coherency traffic, bus activity etc. It can also be modified to model novel features that are to be evaluated. The sim-smp simulator is expected to be useful in research experiments where op- erating system activity causes effects that can not be neglected, alternatively in in ex- periments trying to characterize operating system effects or behavior. An interesting field of use is to characterize power consumption by incorporating a power consump- tion model into the simulator, which is interesting since power consumption is soon to become a bottle neck future embedded or mobile devices.