This changesets adds branch predictor support to the
BaseSimpleCPU. The simple CPUs normally don't need a branch predictor,
however, there are at least two cases where it can be desirable:
1) A simple CPU can be used to warm the branch predictor of an O3
CPU before switching to the slower O3 model.
2) The simple CPU can be used as a quick way of evaluating/debugging
new branch predictors since it exposes branch predictor
statistics.
Limitations:
* Since the simple CPU doesn't speculate, only one instruction will
be active in the branch predictor at a time (i.e., the branch
predictor will never see speculative branches).
* The outcome of a branch prediction does not affect the performance
of the simple CPU.
Currently fatal() ends the simulation in a normal fashion. This results in
the call stack getting lost when using a debugger and it is not always
possible to debug the simulation just from the information provided by the
printed error message. Even though the error is likely due to a user's fault,
the information available should not be thrown away. Hence, this patch to
call abort() from fatal().
Changeset 7274310be1bb (isa: clean up register constants) increased
the value of NumFloatRegs, which triggered a bug in
X86ISA::copyRegs(). This bug is caused by the x87 stack being copied
twice since register indexes past NUM_FLOATREGS are mapped into the
x87 stack relative to the top of the stack, which is undefined when
the copy takes place.
This changeset updates the copyRegs() function to use access registers
using the non-flattening interface, which guarantees that undesirable
register folding does not happen.
The getRFlags and setRFlags utility functions were not updated
correctly when condition registers were separated into their own
register class. This lead to incorrect state transfer in calls from
kvm into the simulator (e.g., m5 readfile ended up in an infinite
loop) and when switching CPUs. This patch makes these utility
functions use getCCReg and setCCReg instead of getIntReg and setIntReg
which read and write the integer registers.
Reviewed-by: Andreas Sandberg <andreas@sandberg.pp.se>
Forces the prefetcher to mispredict twice in a row before resetting the
confidence of prefetching. This helps cases where a load PC strides by a
constant factor, however it may operate on different arrays at times.
Avoids the cost of retraining. Primarily helps with small iteration loops.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
For systems with a tightly coupled L2, a stride-based prefetcher may observe
access requests from both instruction and data L1 caches. However, the PC
address of an instruction miss gives no relevant training information to the
stride based prefetcher(there is no stride to train). In theses cases, its
better if the L2 stride prefetcher simply reverted back to a simple N-block
ahead prefetcher. This patch enables this option.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch extends the classic prefetcher to work on non-block aligned
addresses. Because the existing prefetchers in gem5 mask off the lower
address bits of cache accesses, many predictable strides fail to be
detected. For example, if a load were to stride by 48 bytes, with 64 byte
cachelines, the current stride based prefetcher would see an access pattern
of 0, 64, 64, 128, 192.... Thus not detecting a constant stride pattern. This
patch fixes this, by training the prefetcher on access and not masking off the
lower address bits.
It also adds the following configuration options:
1) Training/prefetching only on cache misses,
2) Training/prefetching only on data acceses,
3) Optionally tagging prefetches with a PC address.
#3 allows prefetchers to train off of prefetch requests in systems with
multiple cache levels and PC-based prefetchers present at multiple levels.
It also effectively allows a pipelining of prefetch requests (like in POWER4)
across multiple levels of cache hierarchy.
Improves performance on my gem5 configuration by 4.3% for SPECINT and 4.7% for SPECFP (geomean).
gem5 makes the incorrect assumption that by binding a socket, it
effectively has allocated a port. Linux only allocates ports once you call
listen on the given socket, not when you call bind. So even if the port was
free when bind was called, another process (gem5 instance) could race in
between the bind & listen calls and steal the port. In the current code, if
the call to bind fails due to the port being in use (EADDRINUSE), gem5 retries
for a different port. However if listen fails, gem5 just panics. The fix is
testing the return value of listen and re-trying if it was due to EADDRINUSE.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
The patch
(1) removes the redundant writeback argument from findVictim()
(2) fixes the description of access() function
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
Note: AArch64 and AArch32 interworking is not supported. If you use an AArch64
kernel you are restricted to AArch64 user-mode binaries. This will be addressed
in a later patch.
Note: Virtualization is only supported in AArch32 mode. This will also be fixed
in a later patch.
Contributors:
Giacomo Gabrielli (TrustZone, LPAE, system-level AArch64, AArch64 NEON, validation)
Thomas Grocutt (AArch32 Virtualization, AArch64 FP, validation)
Mbou Eyole (AArch64 NEON, validation)
Ali Saidi (AArch64 Linux support, code integration, validation)
Edmund Grimley-Evans (AArch64 FP)
William Wang (AArch64 Linux support)
Rene De Jong (AArch64 Linux support, performance opt.)
Matt Horsnell (AArch64 MP, validation)
Matt Evans (device models, code integration, validation)
Chris Adeniyi-Jones (AArch64 syscall-emulation)
Prakash Ramrakhyani (validation)
Dam Sunwoo (validation)
Chander Sudanthi (validation)
Stephan Diestelhorst (validation)
Andreas Hansson (code integration, performance opt.)
Eric Van Hensbergen (performance opt.)
Gabe Black
The CheckerCPU model in pre-v8 code was not checking the
updates to miscellaneous registers due to some methods
for setting misc regs were not instrumented. The v8 patches
exposed this by calling the instrumented misc reg update
methods and then invoking the checker before the main CPU had
updated its misc regs, leading to false positives about
register mismatches. This patch fixes the non-instrumented
misc reg update methods and places calls to the checker in
the proper places in the O3 model.
With ARMv8 support the same misc register id results in accessing different
registers depending on the current mode of the processor. This patch adds
the same orthogonality to the misc register file as the others (int, float, cc).
For all the othre ISAs this is currently a null-implementation.
Additionally, a system variable is added to all the ISA objects.
This patch add support for generating wake-up events in the CPU when an address
that is currently in the exclusive state is hit by a snoop. This mechanism is required
for ARMv8 multi-processor support.
Previously we were casting the result type to the the memory type which
is incorrect for things like dual-memory operations which still return a
single result.
Adds very basic statistics on the number of tag and data accesses within the
cache, which is important for power modelling. For the tags, simply count
the associativity of the cache each time. For the data, this depends on
whether tags and data are accessed sequentially, which is given by a new
parameter. In the parallel case, all data blocks are accessed each time, but
with sequential accesses, a single data block is accessed only on a hit.
This patch enables tracking of cache occupancy per thread along with
ages (in buckets) per cache blocks. Cache occupancy stats are
recalculated on each stat dump.
The probe patch is motivated by the desire to move analytical and trace code
away from functional code. This is achieved by the probe interface which is
essentially a glorified observer model.
What this means to users:
* add a probe point and a "notify" call at the source of an "event"
* add an isolated module, that is being used to carry out *your* analysis (e.g. generate a trace)
* register that module as a probe listener
Note: an example is given for reference in src/cpu/o3/simple_trace.[hh|cc] and src/cpu/SimpleTrace.py
What is happening under the hood:
* every SimObject maintains has a ProbeManager.
* during initialization (src/python/m5/simulate.py) first regProbePoints and
the regProbeListeners is called on each SimObject. this hooks up the probe
point notify calls with the listeners.
FAQs:
Why did you develop probe points:
* to remove trace, stats gathering, analytical code out of the functional code.
* the belief that probes could be generically useful.
What is a probe point:
* a probe point is used to notify upon a given event (e.g. cpu commits an instruction)
What is a probe listener:
* a class that handles whatever the user wishes to do when they are notified
about an event.
What can be passed on notify:
* probe points are templates, and so the user can generate probes that pass any
type of argument (by const reference) to a listener.
What relationships can be generated (1:1, 1:N, N:M etc):
* there isn't a restriction. You can hook probe points and listeners up in a
1:1, 1:N, N:M relationship. They become useful when a number of modules
listen to the same probe points. The idea being that you can add a small
number of probes into the source code and develop a larger number of useful
analysis modules that use information passed by the probes.
Can you give examples:
* adding a probe point to the cpu's commit method allows you to build a trace
module (outputting assembler), you could re-use this to gather instruction
distribution (arithmetic, load/store, conditional, control flow) stats.
Why is the probe interface currently restricted to passing a const reference:
* the desire, initially at least, is to allow an interface to observe
functionality, but not to change functionality.
* of course this can be subverted by const-casting.
What is the performance impact of adding probes:
* when nothing is actively listening to the probes they should have a
relatively minor impact. Profiling has suggested even with a large number of
probes (60) the impact of them (when not active) is very minimal (<1%).
This patch adds observability to the clock period of the clock domains
by including it as a stat.
As a result of adding this, the regressions will be updated in a
separate patch.
Add some values and methods to the request object to track the translation
and access latency for a request and which level of the cache hierarchy responded
to the request.
This patch makes the Clock a TickParamValue just like
Latency/Frequency. There is no longer any need to distinguish it
(originally needed to support multiplication).
This patch fixes a memory leak in the table walker, by ensuring that
the sender state is deleted again if the request packet cannot be
successfully sent.
This patch relaxes the check performed when squashing non-speculative
instructions, as it caused problems with loads that were marked ready,
and then stalled on a blocked cache. The assertion is now allowing
memory references to be non-faulting.
This patch removes an assertion in the simpoint profiling code that
asserts that a previously-seen basic block has the exact same number
of instructions executed as before. This can be false if the basic
block generates aborts or takes interrupts at different locations
within the basic block. The basic block profiling are not affected
significantly as these events are rare in general.
