Both ruby and the system used to maintain memory copies. With the changes
carried for programmed io accesses, only one single memory is required for
fs simulations. This patch sets the copy of memory that used to reside
with the system to null, so that no space is allocated, but address checks
can still be carried out. All the memory accesses now source and sink values
to the memory maintained by ruby.
This patch is the final patch in a series of patches. The aim of the series
is to make ruby more configurable than it was. More specifically, the
connections between controllers are not at all possible (unless one is ready
to make significant changes to the coherence protocol). Moreover the buffers
themselves are magically connected to the network inside the slicc code.
These connections are not part of the configuration file.
This patch makes changes so that these connections will now be made in the
python configuration files associated with the protocols. This requires
each state machine to expose the message buffers it uses for input and output.
So, the patch makes these buffers configurable members of the machines.
The patch drops the slicc code that usd to connect these buffers to the
network. Now these buffers are exposed to the python configuration system
as Master and Slave ports. In the configuration files, any master port
can be connected any slave port. The file pyobject.cc has been modified to
take care of allocating the actual message buffer. This is inline with how
other port connections work.
There are two changes this patch makes to the way configurable members of a
state machine are specified in SLICC. The first change is that the data
member declarations will need to be separated by a semi-colon instead of a
comma. Secondly, the default value to be assigned would now use SLICC's
assignment operator i.e. ':='.
As of now, the enqueue statement can take in any number of 'pairs' as
argument. But we only use the pair in which latency is the key. This
latency is allowed to be either a fixed integer or a member variable of
controller in which the expression appears. This patch drops the use of pairs
in an enqueue statement. Instead, an expression is allowed which will be
interpreted to be the latency of the enqueue. This expression can anything
allowed by slicc including a constant integer or a member variable.