1.5. Troubleshooting / FAQ
This is a collection of common troubleshooting tips and answers to frequently asked questions.
1.5.1. Getting Help
We love to hear from you. If you have questions, want to discuss an idea, or encountered issues while using SimBricks, we are available on Slack for quick answers and interactive discussions. If you find bugs or want to request a feature, feel free to open an issue on GitHub.
1.5.2. Error Opening images/output-base/base.raw
Some of our host simulators, e.g., gem5 and Simics, require raw disk images. If these aren’t available, you will see the error in the title or something similar. If you use our Docker images, we deliberately remove these since Docker doesn’t handle large, sparse files well, which leads to large Docker image sizes. We include disk images in the qcow format though, which can easily be converted to raw. To do so, just run the following (requires QEMU to be built first):
$ make convert-images-raw
If you are not using the provided docker containers, you might need to build the qcow images by running the following (again, requires QEMU to be built first):
$ make build-images-min
1.5.3. Is My Simulation Stuck or Just Slow?
It is possible to check the current timestamp of individual component
simulators. If the timestamp of a simulator which is synchronizing with at least
one other simulator isn’t advancing, the whole simulation is stuck. Many of our
component simulators print their timestamp when you send them a USR1 signal, for
example, by running kill -s USR1 <insert_pid_of_simulator>. By doing this
multiple times, you can check whether the timestamp advances.
If you invoked the orchestration framework in verbose mode (see Running Experiments), the current timestamp is printed directly in the terminal. If not then you have to stop the experiment via Ctrl+C to produce the output JSON file. All the simulators’ output is logged there.