FAx86: An Open-Source FPGA-accelerated x86 Full-system Emulator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis presents FAx86, a hardware/software full-system emulator of commodity computer systems using x86 processors. FAx86 is based upon the open-source IA-32 full-system simulator Bochs and is implemented over a single Virtex-5 FPGA. Our first prototype uses an embedded PowerPC to run the software portion of Bochs and off-loads the instruction decoding function to a low-cost hardware decoder since instruction decode was measured to be the most time consuming part of the software-only emulation. Instruction decoding for x86 architectures is non-trivial due to their variable length and instruction encoding format. The decoder requires only 3% of the total LUTs and 5% of the BRAMs of the FPGA's resources making the design feasible to replicate for many-core emulator implementations. FAx86 prototype boots Linux Debian version 2.6 and runs SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks. FAx86 improves simulation performance over the default Bochs by 5 to 9\\% depending on the workload.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".