Linux Kernel Module Cheat

2.4.2. gem5 Buildroot setup getting started

For the most part, if you just add the --emulator gem5 option or *-gem5 suffix to all commands and everything should magically work.

If you haven’t built Buildroot yet for QEMU Buildroot setup, you can build from the beginning with:

./setup
./build --download-dependencies gem5-buildroot
./run --emulator gem5

If you have already built previously, don’t be afraid: gem5 and QEMU use almost the same root filesystem and kernel, so ./build will be fast.

Remember that the gem5 boot is considerably slower than QEMU since the simulation is more detailed.

If you have a relatively new GCC version and the gem5 build fails on your machine, see: gem5 build broken on recent compiler version.

To get a terminal, either open a new shell and run:

./gem5-shell

You can quit the shell without killing gem5 by typing tilde followed by a period:

~.

If you are inside tmux, which I highly recommend, you can both run gem5 stdout and open the guest terminal on a split window with:

./run --emulator gem5 --tmux

See also: Section 3.3.1, “tmux gem5”.

At the end of boot, it might not be very clear that you have the shell since some printk messages may appear in front of the prompt like this:

# <6>[    1.215329] clocksource: tsc: mask: 0xffffffffffffffff max_cycles: 0x1cd486fa865, max_idle_ns: 440795259574 ns
<6>[    1.215351] clocksource: Switched to clocksource tsc

but if you look closely, the PS1 prompt marker # is there already, just hit enter and a clear prompt line will appear.

If you forgot to open the shell and gem5 exit, you can inspect the terminal output post-mortem at:

less "$(./getvar --emulator gem5 m5out_dir)/system.pc.com_1.device"

More gem5 information is present at: Section 24, “gem5”

Good next steps are:

gem5 run benchmark: how to run a benchmark in gem5 full system, including how to boot Linux, checkpoint and restore to skip the boot on a fast CPU
m5out directory: understand the output files that gem5 produces, which contain information about your run
m5ops: magic guest instructions used to control gem5
Add new files to the Buildroot image: how to add your own files to the image if you have a benchmark that we don’t already support out of the box (also send a pull request!)