Prazor/VHLS ARM LINUX BOOT TRACES

Prazor is a virtual platform for generating energy profiles from multicore CPU systems. It was implemented by David J Greaves and Milos Puzovic. It currently uses SystemC TLM loosely-timed modelling although we aim to port it to a faster simulation substrate in the future.

A complete instruction trace for booting of linux on the dual-ARM Zynq 7010 chip, as simulated on Prazor, is available for download or to regenerate yourself. The self-same kernel binary and disk image run on the real hardware as on the virtual platform.

In this trace, the cores boot, mount various filesystems and processes and then start an interactive shell session. The instructions from both cores are interleaved as entries written to the file. The cores themseleves switch between ARM32 and Thumb2 modes and user and kernel spaces. In this format, each instruction creates a 16 byte entry in the trace file, containing core_no/mode flags, PC address, instruction op-code and operand address for load/stores or data result for ALU or coprocessor moves.

It is easy to add anything else you like to these traces, such as traces of failed load-linked operations, branch mispredicts or cache misses to DRAM.

Example file contents:

0000   00 04 20 00 FC FF FF FF   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   .. .............
0010   00 05 20 00 00 00 00 00   0D 00 00 EA 3C 00 00 00   .. .........<...
0020   00 05 20 00 3C 00 00 00   EB 30 E0 E3 14 FF FF FF   .. .<....0......
0030   00 05 20 00 40 00 00 00   00 30 93 E5 14 FF FF FF   .. .@....0......
0040   00 05 20 00 44 00 00 00   03 38 B0 E1 00 00 00 00   .. .D....8......
0050   00 05 20 00 48 00 00 00   0F 17 A0 E3 00 00 3C 00   .. .H.........<.
0060   00 05 20 00 4C 00 00 00   01 D0 83 E0 00 00 3C 00   .. .L.........<.
0070   00 05 20 00 50 00 00 00   00 10 0F E1 DF 00 00 40   .. .P..........@
0080   00 05 20 00 54 00 00 00   80 10 C1 E3 5F 00 00 40   .. .T......._..@
0090   00 05 20 00 58 00 00 00   01 F0 21 E1 5F 00 00 40   .. .X.....!._..@
... a lot more ...

The full run1 boot sequence is about 6 GB in length and contains about 400 million instructions.

• Console Output (160 lines).

• Complete disassembly of the kernel as runs both on the virtual platform and the real hardware: Kernel Listing (1.2 M lines).

• Binary image of the kernel vmlinux (ELF 9.8 MB).

• Binary trace file of complete kernel boot and user shell prompt ptracer-log.bin (6 GB). Complete disassembly of the kernel as runs both on the virtual platform and the real hardware: Kernel Listing 1.2 M lines.

Video Screen Capture of Interactive Linux Shell Session

Video screen capture : interactive linux session on the SystemC Zynq model: MP4 Video.

EOF.       Prazor Home Page.