This patch drops the NetworkMessage class. The relevant data members and functions
have been moved to the Message class, which was the parent of NetworkMessage.
This structure's only purpose was to provide a comparison function for
ordering messages in the MessageBuffer. The comparison function is now
being moved to the Message class itself. So we no longer require this
structure.
This patch transitions the Ruby Message and its derived classes from
the ad-hoc RefCountingPtr to the c++11 shared_ptr. There are no
changes in behaviour, and the code modifications are mainly replacing
"new" with "make_shared".
The cloning of derived messages is slightly changed as they previously
relied on overriding the base-class through covariant return types.
This patch allows ruby to have multiple clock domains. As I understand
with this patch, controllers can have different frequencies. The entire
network needs to run at a single frequency.
The idea is that with in an object, time is treated in terms of cycles.
But the messages that are passed from one entity to another should contain
the time in Ticks. As of now, this is only true for the message buffers,
but not for the links in the network. As I understand the code, all the
entities in different networks (simple, garnet-fixed, garnet-flexible) should
be clocked at the same frequency.
Another problem is that the directory controller has to operate at the same
frequency as the ruby system. This is because the memory controller does
not make use of the Message Buffer, and instead implements a buffer of its
own. So, it has no idea of the frequency at which the directory controller
is operating and uses ruby system's frequency for scheduling events.
This patch was initiated so as to remove reference to g_system_ptr,
the pointer to Ruby System that is used for getting the current time.
That simple change actual requires changing a lot many things in slicc and
garnet. All these changes are related to how time is handled.
In most of the places, g_system_ptr has been replaced by another clock
object. The changes have been done under the assumption that all the
components in the memory system are on the same clock frequency, but the
actual clocks might be distributed.
Many Ruby structures inherit from the Consumer, which is used for scheduling
events. The Consumer used to relay on an Event Manager for scheduling events
and on g_system_ptr for time. With this patch, the Consumer will now use a
ClockedObject to schedule events and to query for current time. This resulted
in several structures being converted from SimObjects to ClockedObjects. Also,
the MessageBuffer class now requires a pointer to a ClockedObject so as to
query for time.
This patch adds support to different entities in the ruby memory system
for more reliable functional read/write accesses. Only the simple network
has been augmented as of now. Later on Garnet will also support functional
accesses.
The patch adds functional access code to all the different types of messages
that protocols can send around. These messages are functionally accessed
by going through the buffers maintained by the network entities.
The patch also rectifies some of the bugs found in coherence protocols while
testing the patch.
With this patch applied, functional writes always succeed. But functional
reads can still fail.
This patch removes some of the unused typedefs. It also moves
some of the typedefs from Global.hh to TypeDefines.hh. The patch
also eliminates the file NodeID.hh.
Currently the wakeup function for the PerfectSwitch contains three loops -
loop on number of virtual networks
loop on number of incoming links
loop till all messages for this (link, network) have been routed
With an 8 processor mesh network and Hammer protocol, about 11-12% of the
was observed to have been spent in this function, which is the highest
amongst all the functions. It was found that the innermost loop is executed
about 45 times per invocation of the wakeup function, when each invocation
of the wakeup function processes just about one message.
The patch tries to do away with the redundant executions of the innermost
loop. Counters have been added for each virtual network that record the
number of messages that need to be routed for that virtual network. The
inner loops are only executed when the number of messages for that particular
virtual network > 0. This does away with almost 80% of the executions of the
innermost loop. The function now consumes about 5-6% of the total execution
time.
This was somewhat tricky because the RefCnt API was somewhat odd. The
biggest confusion was that the the RefCnt object's constructor that
took a TYPE& cloned the object. I created an explicit virtual clone()
function for things that took advantage of this version of the
constructor. I was conservative and used clone() when I was in doubt
of whether or not it was necessary. I still think that there are
probably too many instances of clone(), but hopefully not too many.
I converted several instances of const MsgPtr & to a simple MsgPtr.
If the function wants to avoid the overhead of creating another
reference, then it should just use a regular pointer instead of a ref
counting ptr.
There were a couple of instances where refcounted objects were created
on the stack. This seems pretty dangerous since if you ever
accidentally make a reference to that object with a ref counting
pointer, bad things are bound to happen.
This basically means changing all #include statements and changing
autogenerated code so that it generates the correct paths. Because
slicc generates #includes, I had to hard code the include paths to
mem/protocol.
