This patch removes the explicit setting of the clock period for
certain instances of CoherentBus, NonCoherentBus and IOCache where the
specified clock is same as the default value of the system clock. As
all the values used are the defaults, there are no performance
changes. There are similar cases where the toL2Bus is set to use the
parent CPU clock which is already the default behaviour.
The main motivation for these simplifications is to ease the
introduction of clock domains.
When casting objects in the generated SWIG interfaces, SWIG uses
classical C-style casts ( (Foo *)bar; ). In some cases, this can
degenerate into the equivalent of a reinterpret_cast (mainly if only a
forward declaration of the type is available). This usually works for
most compilers, but it is known to break if multiple inheritance is
used anywhere in the object hierarchy.
This patch introduces the cxx_header attribute to Python SimObject
definitions, which should be used to specify a header to include in
the SWIG interface. The header should include the declaration of the
wrapped object. We currently don't enforce header the use of the
header attribute, but a warning will be generated for objects that do
not use it.
This patch moves the clock of the CPU, bus, and numerous devices to
the new class ClockedObject, that sits in between the SimObject and
MemObject in the class hierarchy. Although there are currently a fair
amount of MemObjects that do not make use of the clock, they
potentially should do so, e.g. the caches should at some point have
the same clock as the CPU, potentially with a 1:n ratio. This patch
does not introduce any new clock objects or object hierarchies
(clusters, clock domains etc), but is still a step in the direction of
having a more structured approach clock domains.
The most contentious part of this patch is the serialisation of clocks
that some of the modules (but not all) did previously. This
serialisation should not be needed as the clock is set through the
parameters even when restoring from the checkpoint. In other words,
the state is "stored" in the Python code that creates the modules.
The nextCycle methods are also simplified and the clock phase
parameter of the CPU is removed (this could be part of a clock object
once they are introduced).
The copy-engine ports were previously created implicitly and bound
based on the dma port peer rather than relying on the normal Python
binding (connectPorts) being called explicitly. This patch makes the
copy engine port similar to all other ports in that they are visibly
in the Python class and bound using the normal explicit calls through
Python.
