2.4.1. About the gem5 Buildroot setup
This setup is like the QEMU Buildroot setup, but it uses gem5 instead of QEMU as a system simulator.
QEMU tries to run as fast as possible and give correct results at the end, but it does not tell us how many CPU cycles it takes to do something, just the number of instructions it ran. This kind of simulation is known as functional simulation.
The number of instructions executed is a very poor estimator of performance because in modern computers, a lot of time is spent waiting for memory requests rather than the instructions themselves.
gem5 on the other hand, can simulate the system in more detail than QEMU, including:
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simplified CPU pipeline
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caches
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DRAM timing
and can therefore be used to estimate system performance, see: Section 24.2, “gem5 run benchmark” for an example.
The downside of gem5 much slower than QEMU because of the greater simulation detail.
See gem5 vs QEMU for a more thorough comparison.