GitLab

For SimBricks messages sent by gem5, we want the simulation to look like it started at tick 0. The reason is that otherwise, after restoring a checkpoint, connected simulators first have to catch up, i.e. simulate until the checkpoint tick before the simulation can continue.

This adds a new component E2ESimbricksNetwork to the end-to-end
framework, which allows to connect to other simulated networks through
Simbricks.

Instead of passing all parameters using the command line, we write them
first into a file and then pass the filename to the end-to-end
framework.

Use the new basic building blocks SwitchNode and SimpleChannel in the
ns3 end-to-end framework to build topologies.

This temporarily drops support for DDIO and the L3 cache.

Update to newer ns-3 version and adapt code for changes (mostly
renamed files and command line parameters) in the ns-3 submodule.

Add new target `clean-external` to the Makefile, which triggers the
clean task of the respective buid system for each external simulator.
Each simulator can also be cleaned individually by using the targets
`{simulator name}-clean` (e.g. `gem5-clean`).

`make distclean` now actually removes the external simulators

this gets rid of the non-fatal build error 'No names found, cannot describe anything'

Simply installs vanilla simics under sims/external/simics. Because of licensing
restrictions we cannot automatically download simics from the intel page.
Instead the makefile will prompt the user to download to files and add them to
the simics directory.

This commit does not include any simbricks integration at all yet.
Co-authored-by: Antoine Kaufmann <antoinek@mpi-sws.org>

Empty structs are not standard C and sizeof for them in gcc is zero but for c++
is 1.