The patch started of with replacing Time with Cycles in the Consumer class.
But to get ruby to compile, the rest of the changes had to be carried out.
Subsequent patches will further this process, till we completely replace
Time with Cycles.
This patch removes the use of g_system_ptr for event scheduling. Each consumer
object now needs to specify upfront an EventManager object it would use for
scheduling events. This makes the ruby memory system more amenable for a
multi-threaded simulation.
This patch removes printConfig() functions from all structures in Ruby.
Most of the information is already part of config.ini, and where ever it
is not, it would become in due course.
This function duplicates the functionality of allocate() exactly, except that it does not return
a return value. In protocols where you just want to allocate a block
but do not want that block to be your implicitly passed cache_entry, use this function.
Otherwise, SLICC will complain if you do not consume the pointer returned by allocate(),
and if you do a dummy assignment Entry foo := cache.allocate(address), the C++
compiler will complain of an unused variable. This is kind of a hack to get around
those issues, but suggestions welcome.
This is a substitute for MessageBuffers between controllers where you don't
want messages to actually go through the Network, because requests/responses can
always get reordered wrt to one another (even if you turn off Randomization and turn on Ordered)
because you are, after all, going through a network with contention. For systems where you model
multiple controllers that are very tightly coupled and do not actually go through a network,
it is a pain to have to write a coherence protocol to account for mixed up request/response orderings
despite the fact that it's completely unrealistic. This is *not* meant as a substitute for real
MessageBuffers when messages do in fact go over a network.
