This patch adds probe points in Fetch, IEW, Rename and Commit stages as follows.
A probe point is added in the Fetch stage for probing when a fetch request is
sent. Notify is fired on the probe point when a request is sent succesfully in
the first attempt as well as on a retry attempt.
Probe points are added in the IEW stage when an instruction begins to execute
and when execution is complete. This points can be used for monitoring the
execution time of an instruction.
Probe points are added in the Rename stage to probe renaming of source and
destination registers and when there is squashing. These probe points can be
used to track register dependencies and remove when there is squashing.
A probe point for squashing is added in Commit to probe squashed instructions.
This patch fixes a long-standing isue with the port flow
control. Before this patch the retry mechanism was shared between all
different packet classes. As a result, a snoop response could get
stuck behind a request waiting for a retry, even if the send/recv
functions were split. This caused message-dependent deadlocks in
stress-test scenarios.
The patch splits the retry into one per packet (message) class. Thus,
sendTimingReq has a corresponding recvReqRetry, sendTimingResp has
recvRespRetry etc. Most of the changes to the code involve simply
clarifying what type of request a specific object was accepting.
The biggest change in functionality is in the cache downstream packet
queue, facing the memory. This queue was shared by requests and snoop
responses, and it is now split into two queues, each with their own
flow control, but the same physical MasterPort. These changes fixes
the previously seen deadlocks.
This patch changes how faults are passed between methods in an attempt
to copy as few reference-counting pointer instances as possible. This
should avoid unecessary copies being created, contributing to the
increment/decrement of the reference counters.
The o3 cpu could attempt to schedule inactive threads under round-robin SMT
mode.
This is because it maintained an independent priority list of threads from the
active thread list. This priority list could be come stale once threads were
inactive, leading to the cpu trying to fetch/commit from inactive threads.
Additionally the fetch queue is now forcibly flushed of instrctuctions
from the de-scheduled thread.
Relevant output:
24557000: system.cpu: [tid:1]: Calling deactivate thread.
24557000: system.cpu: [tid:1]: Removing from active threads list
24557500: system.cpu:
FullO3CPU: Ticking main, FullO3CPU.
24557500: system.cpu.fetch: Running stage.
24557500: system.cpu.fetch: Attempting to fetch from [tid:1]
This patch adds a fetch queue that sits between fetch and decode to the
o3 cpu. This effectively decouples fetch from decode stalls allowing it
to be more aggressive, running futher ahead in the instruction stream.
The o3 pipeline interlock/stall logic is incorrect. o3 unnecessicarily stalled
fetch and decode due to later stages in the pipeline. In general, a stage
should usually only consider if it is stalled by the adjacent, downstream stage.
Forcing stalls due to later stages creates and results in bubbles in the
pipeline. Additionally, o3 stalled the entire frontend (fetch, decode, rename)
on a branch mispredict while the ROB is being serially walked to update the
RAT (robSquashing). Only should have stalled at rename.
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%).
the current implementation of the fetch buffer in the o3 cpu
is only allowed to be the size of a cache line. some
architectures, e.g., ARM, have fetch buffers smaller than a cache
line, see slide 22 at:
http://www.arm.com/files/pdf/at-exploring_the_design_of_the_cortex-a15.pdf
this patch allows the fetch buffer to be set to values smaller
than a cache line.
This patch removes the notion of a peer block size and instead sets
the cache line size on the system level.
Previously the size was set per cache, and communicated through the
interconnect. There were plenty checks to ensure that everyone had the
same size specified, and these checks are now removed. Another benefit
that is not yet harnessed is that the cache line size is now known at
construction time, rather than after the port binding. Hence, the
block size can be locally stored and does not have to be queried every
time it is used.
A follow-on patch updates the configuration scripts accordingly.
This patch moves the branch predictor files in the o3 and inorder directories
to src/cpu/pred. This allows sharing the branch predictor across different
cpu models.
This patch was originally posted by Timothy Jones in July 2010
but never made it to the repository.
--HG--
rename : src/cpu/o3/bpred_unit.cc => src/cpu/pred/bpred_unit.cc
rename : src/cpu/o3/bpred_unit.hh => src/cpu/pred/bpred_unit.hh
rename : src/cpu/o3/bpred_unit_impl.hh => src/cpu/pred/bpred_unit_impl.hh
rename : src/cpu/o3/sat_counter.hh => src/cpu/pred/sat_counter.hh
Previously, the O3 CPU could stop in the middle of a microcode
sequence. This patch makes sure that the pipeline stops when it has
committed a normal instruction or exited from a microcode
sequence. Additionally, it makes sure that the pipeline has no
instructions in flight when it is drained, which should make draining
more robust.
Draining is controlled in the commit stage, which checks if the next
PC after a committed instruction is in microcode. If this isn't the
case, it requests a squash of all instructions after that the
instruction that just committed and immediately signals a drain stall
to the fetch stage. The CPU then continues to execute until the
pipeline and all associated buffers are empty.
The entire O3 pipeline used to be initialized from init(), which is
called before initState() or unserialize(). This causes the pipeline
to be initialized from an incorrect thread context. This doesn't
currently lead to correctness problems as instructions fetched from
the incorrect start PC will be squashed a few cycles after
initialization.
This patch will affect the regressions since the O3 CPU now issues its
first instruction fetch to the correct PC instead of 0x0.
This patch is a first step to using Cycles as a parameter type. The
main affected modules are the CPUs and the Ruby caches. There are
definitely plenty more places that are affected, but this patch serves
as a starting point to making the transition.
An important part of this patch is to actually enable parameters to be
specified as Param.Cycles which involves some changes to params.py.
These classes are always used together, and merging them will give the ISAs
more flexibility in how they cache things and manage the process.
--HG--
rename : src/arch/x86/predecoder_tables.cc => src/arch/x86/decoder_tables.cc
This patch adds the necessary flags to the SConstruct and SConscript
files for compiling using clang 2.9 and later (on Ubuntu et al and OSX
XCode 4.2), and also cleans up a bunch of compiler warnings found by
clang. Most of the warnings are related to hidden virtual functions,
comparisons with unsigneds >= 0, and if-statements with empty
bodies. A number of mismatches between struct and class are also
fixed. clang 2.8 is not working as it has problems with class names
that occur in multiple namespaces (e.g. Statistics in
kernel_stats.hh).
clang has a bug (http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=7247) which
causes confusion between the container std::set and the function
Packet::set, and this is currently addressed by not including the
entire namespace std, but rather selecting e.g. "using std::vector" in
the appropriate places.
This patch performs minimal changes to move the instruction and data
ports from specialised subclasses to the base CPU (to the largest
degree possible). Ultimately it servers to make the CPU(s) have a
well-defined interface to the memory sub-system.
This change pulls the instruction decoding machinery (including caches) out of
the StaticInst class and puts it into its own class. This has a few intrinsic
benefits. First, the StaticInst code, which has gotten to be quite large, gets
simpler. Second, the code that handles decode caching is now separated out
into its own component and can be looked at in isolation, making it easier to
understand. I took the opportunity to restructure the code a bit which will
hopefully also help.
Beyond that, this change also lays some ground work for each ISA to have its
own, potentially stateful decode object. We'd be able to include less
contextualizing information in the ExtMachInst objects since that context
would be applied at the decoder. Also, the decoder could "know" ahead of time
that all the instructions it's going to see are going to be, for instance, 64
bit mode, and it will have one less thing to check when it decodes them.
Because the decode caching mechanism has been separated out, it's now possible
to have multiple caches which correspond to different types of decoding
context. Having one cache for each element of the cross product of different
configurations may become prohibitive, so it may be desirable to clear out the
cache when relatively static state changes and not to have one for each
setting.
Because the decode function is no longer universally accessible as a static
member of the StaticInst class, a new function was added to the ThreadContexts
that returns the applicable decode object.
Fixed up the patch from Yasuko Watanabe that enabled pipelining of fetch accessess to
icache to work with recent changes to main repository.
Also added in ability for fetch stage to delay issuing the fault carrying
nop when a pipeline fetch causes a fault and no fetch bandwidth is available
until the next cycle.
This patch fixes two problems with the O3 cpu model. The first is an issue
with an instruction fetch causing a fault on the next address while the
current macro-op is being issued. This happens when the micro-ops exceed
the fetch bandwdith and then on the next cycle the fetch stage attempts
to issue a request to the next line while it still has micro-ops to issue
if the next line faults a fault is attached to a micro-op in the currently
executing macro-op rather than a "nop" from the next instruction block.
This leads to an instruction incorrectly faulting when on fetch when
it had no reason to fault.
A similar problem occurs with interrupts. When an interrupt occurs the
fetch stage nominally stops issuing instructions immediately. This is incorrect
in the case of a macro-op as the current location might not be interruptable.
Some ISAs (like ARM) relies on hardware page table walkers. For those ISAs,
when a TLB miss occurs, initiateTranslation() can return with NoFault but with
the translation unfinished.
Instructions experiencing a delayed translation due to a hardware page table
walk are deferred until the translation completes and kept into the IQ. In
order to keep track of them, the IQ has been augmented with a queue of the
outstanding delayed memory instructions. When their translation completes,
instructions are re-executed (only their initiateAccess() was already
executed; their DTB translation is now skipped). The IEW stage has been
modified to support such a 2-pass execution.
When this condition occurs the cpu should restart the fetch stage to fetch from
the original execution path. Fault handling in the commit stage is cleaned up a
little bit so the control flow is simplier. Finally, if an instruction is being
used to carry a fault it isn't executed, so the fault propagates appropriately.
These files really aren't general enough to belong in src/base.
This patch doesn't reorder include lines, leaving them unsorted
in many cases, but Nate's magic script will fix that up shortly.
--HG--
rename : src/base/sched_list.hh => src/cpu/sched_list.hh
rename : src/base/timebuf.hh => src/cpu/timebuf.hh
This change is a low level and pervasive reorganization of how PCs are managed
in M5. Back when Alpha was the only ISA, there were only 2 PCs to worry about,
the PC and the NPC, and the lsb of the PC signaled whether or not you were in
PAL mode. As other ISAs were added, we had to add an NNPC, micro PC and next
micropc, x86 and ARM introduced variable length instruction sets, and ARM
started to keep track of mode bits in the PC. Each CPU model handled PCs in
its own custom way that needed to be updated individually to handle the new
dimensions of variability, or, in the case of ARMs mode-bit-in-the-pc hack,
the complexity could be hidden in the ISA at the ISA implementation's expense.
Areas like the branch predictor hadn't been updated to handle branch delay
slots or micropcs, and it turns out that had introduced a significant (10s of
percent) performance bug in SPARC and to a lesser extend MIPS. Rather than
perpetuate the problem by reworking O3 again to handle the PC features needed
by x86, this change was introduced to rework PC handling in a more modular,
transparent, and hopefully efficient way.
PC type:
Rather than having the superset of all possible elements of PC state declared
in each of the CPU models, each ISA defines its own PCState type which has
exactly the elements it needs. A cross product of canned PCState classes are
defined in the new "generic" ISA directory for ISAs with/without delay slots
and microcode. These are either typedef-ed or subclassed by each ISA. To read
or write this structure through a *Context, you use the new pcState() accessor
which reads or writes depending on whether it has an argument. If you just
want the address of the current or next instruction or the current micro PC,
you can get those through read-only accessors on either the PCState type or
the *Contexts. These are instAddr(), nextInstAddr(), and microPC(). Note the
move away from readPC. That name is ambiguous since it's not clear whether or
not it should be the actual address to fetch from, or if it should have extra
bits in it like the PAL mode bit. Each class is free to define its own
functions to get at whatever values it needs however it needs to to be used in
ISA specific code. Eventually Alpha's PAL mode bit could be moved out of the
PC and into a separate field like ARM.
These types can be reset to a particular pc (where npc = pc +
sizeof(MachInst), nnpc = npc + sizeof(MachInst), upc = 0, nupc = 1 as
appropriate), printed, serialized, and compared. There is a branching()
function which encapsulates code in the CPU models that checked if an
instruction branched or not. Exactly what that means in the context of branch
delay slots which can skip an instruction when not taken is ambiguous, and
ideally this function and its uses can be eliminated. PCStates also generally
know how to advance themselves in various ways depending on if they point at
an instruction, a microop, or the last microop of a macroop. More on that
later.
Ideally, accessing all the PCs at once when setting them will improve
performance of M5 even though more data needs to be moved around. This is
because often all the PCs need to be manipulated together, and by getting them
all at once you avoid multiple function calls. Also, the PCs of a particular
thread will have spatial locality in the cache. Previously they were grouped
by element in arrays which spread out accesses.
Advancing the PC:
The PCs were previously managed entirely by the CPU which had to know about PC
semantics, try to figure out which dimension to increment the PC in, what to
set NPC/NNPC, etc. These decisions are best left to the ISA in conjunction
with the PC type itself. Because most of the information about how to
increment the PC (mainly what type of instruction it refers to) is contained
in the instruction object, a new advancePC virtual function was added to the
StaticInst class. Subclasses provide an implementation that moves around the
right element of the PC with a minimal amount of decision making. In ISAs like
Alpha, the instructions always simply assign NPC to PC without having to worry
about micropcs, nnpcs, etc. The added cost of a virtual function call should
be outweighed by not having to figure out as much about what to do with the
PCs and mucking around with the extra elements.
One drawback of making the StaticInsts advance the PC is that you have to
actually have one to advance the PC. This would, superficially, seem to
require decoding an instruction before fetch could advance. This is, as far as
I can tell, realistic. fetch would advance through memory addresses, not PCs,
perhaps predicting new memory addresses using existing ones. More
sophisticated decisions about control flow would be made later on, after the
instruction was decoded, and handed back to fetch. If branching needs to
happen, some amount of decoding needs to happen to see that it's a branch,
what the target is, etc. This could get a little more complicated if that gets
done by the predecoder, but I'm choosing to ignore that for now.
Variable length instructions:
To handle variable length instructions in x86 and ARM, the predecoder now
takes in the current PC by reference to the getExtMachInst function. It can
modify the PC however it needs to (by setting NPC to be the PC + instruction
length, for instance). This could be improved since the CPU doesn't know if
the PC was modified and always has to write it back.
ISA parser:
To support the new API, all PC related operand types were removed from the
parser and replaced with a PCState type. There are two warts on this
implementation. First, as with all the other operand types, the PCState still
has to have a valid operand type even though it doesn't use it. Second, using
syntax like PCS.npc(target) doesn't work for two reasons, this looks like the
syntax for operand type overriding, and the parser can't figure out if you're
reading or writing. Instructions that use the PCS operand (which I've
consistently called it) need to first read it into a local variable,
manipulate it, and then write it back out.
Return address stack:
The return address stack needed a little extra help because, in the presence
of branch delay slots, it has to merge together elements of the return PC and
the call PC. To handle that, a buildRetPC utility function was added. There
are basically only two versions in all the ISAs, but it didn't seem short
enough to put into the generic ISA directory. Also, the branch predictor code
in O3 and InOrder were adjusted so that they always store the PC of the actual
call instruction in the RAS, not the next PC. If the call instruction is a
microop, the next PC refers to the next microop in the same macroop which is
probably not desirable. The buildRetPC function advances the PC intelligently
to the next macroop (in an ISA specific way) so that that case works.
Change in stats:
There were no change in stats except in MIPS and SPARC in the O3 model. MIPS
runs in about 9% fewer ticks. SPARC runs with 30%-50% fewer ticks, which could
likely be improved further by setting call/return instruction flags and taking
advantage of the RAS.
TODO:
Add != operators to the PCState classes, defined trivially to be !(a==b).
Smooth out places where PCs are split apart, passed around, and put back
together later. I think this might happen in SPARC's fault code. Add ISA
specific constructors that allow setting PC elements without calling a bunch
of accessors. Try to eliminate the need for the branching() function. Factor
out Alpha's PAL mode pc bit into a separate flag field, and eliminate places
where it's blindly masked out or tested in the PC.
A whole bunch of stuff has been converted to use the new params stuff, but
the CPU wasn't one of them. While we're at it, make some things a bit
more stylish. Most of the work was done by Gabe, I just cleaned stuff up
a bit more at the end.
into doughnut.hpl.hp.com:/home/gblack/newmem-o3-micro
src/cpu/base_dyn_inst_impl.hh:
src/cpu/o3/fetch_impl.hh:
Hand merge
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 0c0692033ac30133672d8dfe1f1a27e9d9e95a3d
src/cpu/o3/alpha/cpu_impl.hh:
Pass ISA-specific O3 CPU to FullO3CPU as a constructor parameter instead of using setCPU functions.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 74f4b1f5fb6f95a56081f367cce7ff44acb5688a
src/cpu/o3/fetch.hh:
src/cpu/o3/fetch_impl.hh:
Update code so that the O3 CPU can handle not initially having anything hooked up to its ports.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 04bcef44e754735d821509ebd69b0ef9c8ef8e2c
RangeSize as a function takes a start address, and a SIZE, and will make the range (start, start+size-1) for you.
src/cpu/memtest/memtest.hh:
src/cpu/o3/fetch.hh:
src/cpu/o3/lsq.hh:
src/cpu/ozone/front_end.hh:
src/cpu/ozone/lw_lsq.hh:
src/cpu/simple/atomic.hh:
src/cpu/simple/timing.hh:
Fix RangeSize arguments
src/dev/alpha/tsunami_cchip.cc:
src/dev/alpha/tsunami_io.cc:
src/dev/alpha/tsunami_pchip.cc:
src/dev/baddev.cc:
pioSize indicates SIZE, not a mask
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : d385521fcfe58f8dffc8622260937e668a47a948
