sniper/CHANGELOG

Version 6.1
  * Support for newer Pin versions, up to Pin 2.14-71313 / PinPlay 2.1
  * Support GCC 4.9
  * Integrate the Cheetah cache models
  * Remove legacy Graphite core models simple, magic and iocoom
  * A new dumpstats.py option (-c|--config) prints configuration parameters one-per-line
  * Numerous bug fixes and improvements

Version 6.0
  * Add Instruction Window-Centric core model (internal name: ROB core model, use rob.cfg)
  * Add SMT support (IWC/ROB core model only, use smt*.cfg)
  * Add SniperLite, a fast cache-only model (use nehalem-lite.cfg)
  * Add DRAM cache prefetcher
  * Add support for non-standard SQLite paths through the SQLITE_PATH environment variable
  * Add sniperdiff.py for easy diff-ing of Sniper results and configurations
  * Branch predictor accuracy improvements
  * New roi-icount script to more easily specify fast-forward/warmup/detailed lengths by instruction count
  * Faster mode for running single-program / single-threaded PinBall (--pinball-non-sift)
  * Support for newer Pin versions, up to Pin 2.13.65163 / PinPlay 1.3
  * Numerous bug fixes and improvements

Version 5.3
  * Fast, cache-only one-IPC timing model (-c cacheonly)
  * Add energystats script to provide runtime energy counters
  * Add Python-based thread scheduler infrastructure and example
  * Add support for Query-Based Selection (Jaleel, MICRO 2010)
  * Add support for plotting Bottle graphs (Du Bois, OOPSLA 2013)
  * Memory tracker infrastructure to measure cache hit rates by allocation site
  * Support for McPAT 1.0
  * Various bug fixes and improvements

Version 5.2
  * Configurable coherency protocol (MSI/MESI/MESIF), made MESI the default
  * Add more cache statistics: LRU stack distance historgram, LLC miss latency breakdown
  * Implement auxiliary tag directories (ATD) to track constructive/destructive interference in shared caches
  * Implement 2-level TLB hierarchy with Nehalem configuration
  * New hooks HOOK_APPLICATION_ROI_{BEGIN,END}, called even when ROI markers are not used directly; these hooks can be used to trigger ROI from a script
  * Improved stop-by-icount script to support ROI-relative warmup and detailed lengths
  * Ondemand routine stack printer: configure routine_tracer/type=ondemand, then send a SIGUSR1 to Sniper to get a per-thread application backtrace
  * Emulate leaf 11 of the cpuid instruction to pass topology information to runtimes (used by Intel OpenMP)
  * Emulation of sched_* system calls, gettimeofday replacement, cpuid in SIFT mode
  * Improve handling of LD_LIBRARY_PATH: use SNIPER_SIM_LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the simulator, SNIPER_APP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the application
  * Re-implemented BigSmall scheduler to use thread affinity calls rather than the low-level (and error prone) moveThread API
  * sim.thread Python interface to interact with threads (get num threads, get appid, get/set affinity)
  * Use newest Pin version 2.13.61206
  * Numerous bug fixes and improvements

Version 5.1
  * New Suggestions for Optimization visualization (--viz-aso)
  * KCacheGrind-compatible output for profiling simulated applications (--profile)
  * Roaming (equal-time) scheduler allowing for thread migrations (scheduler/type=roaming)
  * Support for newest Pin version 2.12.58423
  * Various bugfixes and improvements

Version 5.0
  * Periodic sampling infrastructure
  * Extensible per-thread statistics infrastructure
  * Routine tracing infrastructure and per-function statistics
  * NUCA cache model
  * Distributed tag directories
  * sim.mem Python module for reading application memory
  * Various other improvements and bugfixes

Version 4.2
  * Various accuracy fixes for Nehalem core model
  * Add cache replacement policies: NRU, MRU, NMRU, PLRU, S-RRIP, Random
  * Add statistical DRAM performance model
  * Add syscall enter/exit hooks
  * Add topology view to visualization
  * Speed up McPAT by caching architecture-specific CACTI results
  * Fixes to running multiple multi-threaded workloads
  * Multi-programmed mode: end simulation at first/last program end, optional trace/application restart
  * PinPlay support

Version 4.1
  * Visualization support (--viz)
  * Minor cleanups and bug fixes

Version 4.0
  * Thread migration and scheduler support
  * Pinned (round-robin), static, random thread schedulers
  * Heterogeneous configuration files with tags
  * Configurable address2set hash functions for non-power of two sized caches
  * Various prefetcher improvements
  * DRAM cache model
  * One-IPC fast-forward model
  * Fault injection framework
  * New SQLite3-based statistics format
  * ROI support for SIFT
  * Support for MPI applications (shared-memory backend)
  * Limited support for Jikes/DaCapo benchmarks
  * Use newest Pin 2.12.53271
  * Add script for generating topology images
  * Preserve history in Git repository
  * Many cleanups and bugfixes

Version 3.07
  * Prefetcher improvements, add global history buffer-based prefetcher
  * HOOK_PERIODIC_INS: Instruction-based periodic callback
  * Implement CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID syscall interface
  * Add example scripts for periodic statistics, periodic McPAT, simulating limited iteration counts
  * Support for Pin 2.12
  * Fixes to Python environment
  * Various bugfixes

Version 3.06
  * Fix modeled size of network messages
  * Build fixes for 32-bit, compiler overrides

Version 3.05
  * Scheduler: expose application ID
  * Add example script roi-iter.py to dynamically select ROI based on SimMarkers
  * CPI stacks: --aggregate and --partial support, fixes for heterogeneous configurations
  * Traces: support for 32-bit executables
  * Build fixes for older Linux versions

Version 3.04
  * Support for running multiple multi-threaded workloads in a single simulation
  * McPAT fixes for heterogeneous configurations
  * Build system fixes for newer Linux versions

Version 3.03
  * Bugfixes in configuration parser, starting of multi-program workloads

Version 3.02
  * Fixes for specifying heterogeneous configurations
  * L2 prefetcher improvements
  * Perfect cache modeling
  * Self-modifying code support
  * PyControl scripting interface
  * GCC 4.7 support
  * McPAT integration for area, power and energy predictions

Version 3.01
  * Add heterogeneous cache configuration support
  * Emulate pause, sleep system calls
  * Improve support for 32-bit applications
  * Pin 2.11 support

Version 3.0
  * Support for heterogeneous core types
  * Separate core microarchitectural characteristics into CoreModel class
  * Improve CPI stack detail
  * Add initial implementation for basic L2 prefetcher
  * Optionally access DRAM directly in configurations with a single LLC
  * Deprecate replacement of pthread_* synchronization calls
  * Support more SYS_futex options
  * Remove unused code for Graphite FULL mode
  * Fixes to the build system, including parallel builds (make -j)
  * Support for building on 32-bit hosts
  * Remove configuration defaults from code, require everything to be specified in a configuration file

Version 2.04
  * Fix trace playback for non-predicated instructions

Version 2.03
  * Fix record-trace -d 0
  * Fix keyboard interrupt behavior

Version 2.02
  * [sift_recorder] Add support for -f (number of instructions to fast-forward) and -d (number of instructions to trace in detail) command-line options

Version 2.01
  * Compilation fixes for GCC 4.6

Version 2.0
  * Multi-program mode
  * Instruction trace collection tool
  * New ROI-aware sim.out file generation
  * CPI components for various SYS_futex system calls
  * Improve accuracy of the core interval model
  * GCC 4.6 support

Version 1.06
  * Fix queue overflow when many TLB misses occur in a single basic block

Version 1.05
  * [cpistack] Add --abstime command-line parameter to scale Y axis according to absolute time in seconds
  * [interval] Fix branch resolution latency calculation

Version 1.04
  * Fix instruction dependencies for LEA and stores
  * Support synchronous signal handling (when using the
    -g --general/enable_signals=true command-line parameter)

Version 1.03
  * Build changes to improve compatibility with Fedora 16

Version 1.02
  * Remove unneeded warnings from CPI stack script

Version 1.0
  * Initial public release