README.eio

To use the new external I/O traces (EIO traces) and checkpointing features:

  make an EIO trace:

        sim-eio -trace FOO.eio tests/bin.little/test-fmath

  make an EIO trace but starting 1000000 instructions into the execution:

        sim-eio -fastfwd 1000000 -trace FOO.eio tests/bin.little/test-fmath

  run an EIO trace:

        sim-whatever FOO.eio

  create checkpoint inside an EIO trace execution (eg, @ inst # 1000):

        sim-eio -dump FOO.chkpt 1000: FOO.eio

  run an EIO trace starting at checkpoint:

        sim-whatever -chkpt FOO.chkpt FOO.eio

The EIO traces are self checking, if the data going into the system
calls from registers or memory ever deviates from the traced run,
you'll get a detailed error message indicating the inconsistancy.
Other than the error messages, EIO executions produce no output,
because they're not really interacting with the OS, just the EIO
trace and EIO module (eio.[hc]).

The "-dump" option takes two arguments, a checkpoint filename and
a range, see "sim-eio -h" for details on ranges.  "1000:" means
trigger the checkpoint at instruction count 1000.

The EIO tracing support is implemented in eio.[hc] and in the libexo
directory (libexo reads and write EXO files, which is the I/O format
used by the EIO code).  Look at the support added to sim-safe.c
to support tracing:

        - predecode is disabled when EIO tracing, since the memory
          is already predecoded

        - when tracing is enabled, SYSCALL()'s call eio_read_trace()
          instead of ss_syscall()

Plus, there are eio_*() calls in main.c which set up the initial memory
image and checkpoints.  That's it, its a very lightweight interface.