Looking for GUI application programs for experiments

[William Cohen]

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 03:28:15PM -0400, William Cohen wrote:
>> linked programs like SPEC CPU to provide workload for the simulator. This 
>> is very different than the typical shared-library, GUI application 
> 
> You know you can catch TLB misses on some real x86 processors I assume ?
> 
> (You load the page table entry as missing then when you take the trap you
>  put the entry in, touch the page to load it, and then mark it missing again)
> 
> Alan
> 

Hi Alan,

This method would address some of the for future work: how to speed up the data 
collection and avoid the distortions caused by the addition mmap regions 
valgrind pulls in.

I think that there have been some previous research implementing this, e.g. Tape 
Worm. Just thinking how this TLB trap handling would work for the following cases:

	instructions spanning pages
	instructions with data reference (two (or more) page accesses)


The ability not to need a dedicated machine did factor into the choice. The use 
of Valgrind was also influence about what students are comfortable with. 
Modifying valgrind, a user-space only tool, is a bit easier when things don't 
work correctly for a student.

-Will