Spec '06 benchmarks on Gem5: Increasing stack size by one page

Question

I am trying to run the Spec '06 benchmarks on Gem5. All of the benchmarks I've tried seem to start up normally and then output the following and stall indefinitely:

src/sim/mem_state.cc:448: info: Increasing stack size by one page.

Some tests output this multiple times before stalling and others only once. By stall I mean that the process doesn't output anything, even after several days, yet doesn't crash. I expect the process to produce output regularly.

I see online that others have had the same issue but I've never found a fix. Following suggestions I have seen online I have tried:

• Changing the stack size in sim/process.cc and arch/x86/process.cc to 256 x 1024 x 1024 from 8 x 1024 x 1024

• Increase the size of the physical memory in my config file to 8GB

• Increase the CPU speed in my config file to 4Ghz

• In src/sim/syscall_emul.hh change rlp->rlim_cur = rlp -> rlim_max * 64 * 1024 * 1024 from ... * 8 * 1024 * 1024

• Moved the test from a docker container to a server which has 5.2 GB of free memory and 7.5 GB of free swap. The process apparently only takes up .8% of mem and 100% of a single CPU out of 48 cores available

• Ran the process with option --mem-size = 8GB

• Tried running 401.bzip2, the simplest spec benchmark, on a mock input file of 21 bytes.

• Ran the process with ramulator2 as my DRAM manager and without. While running with ramulator2 I get the following error and the process does crash:

  fatal: fatal condition freePages() <= 0 occurred: Out of memory, please increase size of physical memory. Memory Usage: 376876 KBytes

I managed to get in contact with someone I found online who faced the same error in the past and he said "iirc it is coming because your dram size in gem5 simulation is greater than the size of main memory i.e. dram of the host machine (your pc or laptop). It is crudely similar to the case when you try to install a software bigger than your ssd and your os says not enough space.Try reducing the dram size in the simulation config or running it on a different machine"

I don't understand how this can be the case, though, given that the server I am running the test on seems to have ample space. I also tried running the tests with a Gem5 config file that created as small a process as possible with only 512 MB of memory.

Has anyone run into this error before? I would appreciate any help. I am happy to send my config file but I don't want to overwhelm the question with code.