Shade - A brief Overview

Overview

Shade is a library of Instruction Set simulator tools for the SPARC V8 (and V9) architecture. It provides a set of routines so that you can easily write a program that takes as input normal executables on the Sun's. The framework it presents is that it gives you access to each instruction, before and after it has been executed. At those times you can write your own statistics routines based on:

the instruction,
the register file
the state of the condition codes
the results of branches, and if instructions are annulled
the software trap numbers

There is some more detailed information here.

LICENSE note

Members of cse548 have a license to use Shade. The distribution is in /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Shade. In that directory, LICENSE.txt describes the license. The key sentance is:

	This Software may not be redistributed by the Licensee in
either source or binary form.

Which I interpret to mean you aren't supposed to allow other people to copy bits.

Available Simulators

There are a number of simulators that have already been written to measure some basic statistics about programs. They are located in /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Shade/shade.v8/bin. The basic invocation of a simulator is:

    [simulator name] -c "name of program to simulate"

So to run the instruction counter on the date program, type:

    icount -c "date"

The following simulators are available:

cachesim5 simulates a cache heirarchy on an application program. You can specify the heirarchy of data, instruction, and unified caches, as well as cache size, block size, sub-block size, set associativity, set replacement algorithm (random or lru), and write policy (write-back or write-allocate). It supports some form of inclusion, but appears to only allow you to include either the insturction or data cache as part of a unified cache, but not both.

icount counts the number of executed instructions in a program.

ifreq prints the number of instructions (by opcode) executed and/or annuled in a program.

pairs prints statistics about frequency of sequences of two instructions by instruction pair.

trips does the same analysis as pairs execept for triplets of insturctions.

window prints statistics about register window usage including over/underflow counts and save/restore run lengths.

Building your own analyzer

There is an introduction to Shade in the www directory: /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Shade/shade.v8/doc/intro/intro.ps. For example, to compile your tool, type:

  (Assuming $SHADE is /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Shade/shade.v8)
  (Assuming $SPIX  is /cse/www/education/courses/cse548/96w/tools/Shade/spixtools.v8)
  cc -I$SHADE/src/include -I$SPIX/src/include myprog.c -o myprog \
	$SHADE/lib/libshade.a $SPIX/lib/libspix.a

If you use the simulator as mentioned in the Introuction guide, your analyzer will read commands to analyze from standard input. Two example programs are in Shade/shade.v8/eg. One is from the introuction, and the other is a stand-alone/stripped version of icount.c To compile the example programs in $SHADE/src/bin, use the makefile in that directory.