Dear M5 Users, Today, it is our pleasure to announce the public availability of the M5 repository. It was quite a bit of work, but we've managed to get the copyright holders on M5 code to agree to a single BSD style license for M5. The one major exception to this is the new x86 code. This code is partially owned by Hewlett-Packard and is under a slightly more restrictive license than the rest. I'm no lawyer, but I'd summarize the license as this: you can't sell this code or derivative works, but you can use it to do research (corporate or academic). This license was largely a byproduct of HP's ownership of some IP that they were worried could be compromised by the BSD license. The repository uses a revision control system called Mercurial (http://selenic.com/mercurial). Mercurial is a decentralized source control system that allows users to do all source operations without connecting to a central repository. In brief it allows you to create a copy of the m5sim.org repository that is fully functional. Instead of having to manually diff/patch your changes when a new version is released simply executing a command will "pull" all changes in the m5sim.org repository into your local repository launching a merge tool whenever necessary. Additionally, sending patches to us for inclusion in the m5sim.org repository is a single command. We hope that this change will both make using M5 easier as bug fixes can be obtained in a much easier fashion and increase the community involvement in developing M5. For more information about the repository, see: http://www.m5sim.org/wiki/index.php/Repository In addition we have opened the development mailing list to the public (http://www.m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/m5-dev to subscribe). This list is for the day-to-day development of M5. The whole point of releasing the repository is to encourage user participation and allow a path for a larger community of people to be able to develop and improve M5. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to make contributing patches and features easier. We hope this becomes useful for everyone! Sincerely, The M5 Team