Unfinished Projects — Broken Links On Gem5 Website
I continue to live my unfulfilled dream to be an unpaid technical writer
Smack said that Gem5 looks like a really hard open source project to contribute to, and I agree. If you came to Medium looking for an insightful story by someone who knows a lot about Gem5, here’s a link to Ian Neal’s profile.
But here’s the angle I wanted to take: The Gem5 website is…well…a website. I want to do what I did for Splunk as a technical writer intern — I didn’t learn their entire platform in a few weeks, but I did work on a specific part of their documentation and learn a few things in the process.
The Issue
Admittedly, this is some pretty low-hanging fruit. In 2020, someone reported on JIRA to write that their 2015 conference links were broken.
It’s not hard to replicate, but what I found interesting is that the issue still persisted on Firefox and Chrome. I had a look at the markdown file, and it’s not like these are just dead links.
So that’s the next thing to do. Look at what Media: does in Jekyll and try to figure out what the person who authored this page was trying to do. I used find in the _pages directory to look for powerpoint files, and I’m not seeing these.
Trying To Make Sense Of Gem5
If I managed to track down the actual files, I could even vicariously relive 2015 and get to experience their conference in my mind. Maybe whoever wrote this only got half-done? They don’t even seem to have linked the 2015 conference in their events page, almost as if they are trying to hide something.
On closer inspection, Gem5 is a simulator used in academia. I found something kind of interesting. In 2023, researchers commissioned an open challenge. In response, some researchers in London created this project and wrote this paper.
They used large language models, ie ChatGPT and were able to increase Gem5’s code coverage (for unit tests) by 1000 lines.
