[MAJOR UPDATE]: gem5-Aladdin and LLVM-Tracer v2.0

[Sam Xi]

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce gem5-Aladdin v2.0. This is a major update that modernizes some of the most aging parts of the infrastructure and brings a large set of new features for SoC-accelerator system modeling and research. 

The headlining new features are:

• LLVM-Tracer has been updated to LLVM 6.0 and now supports C++ programs in a limited fashion. While the accelerated kernel being traced still must be plain C code, all surrounding code can now be written in C++.
• Aladdin now supports sampled execution of accelerated kernels.
• Accelerators can be woken up using an interrupt-like mechanism, rather than the old polling based mechanism.

See the README for more features and details and examples of how to use them.

To support these updates, we have pushed an updated Docker image with all the environment dependencies to Docker Hub. You may find the new image at xyzsam/gem5-aladdin:llvm-6.0 (tagged llvm-6.0). The older Docker image is now tagged llvm-3.4. We highly recommend using the Docker image over trying to install all the dependencies manually.

All new code has been pushed to the master branch of their respective repositories. Release markers:

• gem5-aladdin: tagged v2.0 with commit hash d27d6eb.
  
• Aladdin: tagged v2.0 with commit hash 92187d7
• LLVM-Tracer: tagged v2.0 with commit hash 2fb892c

Finally, I'd like to thank Yuan Yao for all of his many contributions to these new features! This update wouldn't have been possible without him.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask here. Thanks for all your interest!

Sam