A set of patches was recently committed to allow multiple clock domains
in ruby. In those patches, I had inadvertently made an incorrect use of
the clocks. Suppose object A needs to schedule an event on object B. It
was possible that A accesses B's clock to schedule the event. This is not
possible in actual system. Hence, changes are being to the Consumer class
so as to avoid such happenings. Note that in a multi eventq simulation,
this can possibly lead to an incorrect simulation.
There are two functions in the Consumer class that are used for scheduling
events. The first function takes in the relative delay over the current time
as the argument and adds the current time to it for scheduling the event.
The second function takes in the absolute time (in ticks) for scheduling the
event. The first function is now being moved to protected section of the
class so that only objects of the derived classes can use it. All other
objects will have to specify absolute time while scheduling an event
for some consumer.
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.
The patch started of with replacing Time with Cycles in the Consumer class.
But to get ruby to compile, the rest of the changes had to be carried out.
Subsequent patches will further this process, till we completely replace
Time with Cycles.
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 resurrects ruby's cache warmup capability. It essentially
makes use of all the infrastructure that was added to the controllers,
memories and the cache recorder.
At the same time, rename the trace flags to debug flags since they
have broader usage than simply tracing. This means that
--trace-flags is now --debug-flags and --trace-help is now --debug-help
At a couple of places in PerfectSwitch.cc and MessageBuffer.cc, DPRINTF()
has not been provided with correct number of arguments. The patch fixes these
bugs.
Overall, continue to progress Ruby debug messages to more of the normal M5
debug message style
- add a name() to the Ruby Throttle & PerfectSwitch objects so that the debug output
isn't littered w/"global:" everywhere.
- clean up messages that print over multiple lines when possible
- clean up duplicate prints in the message buffer
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.
By stalling and waiting the mandatory queue instead of recycling it, one can
ensure that no incoming messages are starved when the mandatory queue puts
signficant of pressure on the L1 cache controller (i.e. the ruby memtester).
--HG--
rename : src/mem/slicc/ast/WakeUpDependentsStatementAST.py => src/mem/slicc/ast/WakeUpAllDependentsStatementAST.py
This patch allows messages to be stalled in their input buffers and wait
until a corresponding address changes state. In order to make this work,
all in_ports must be ranked in order of dependence and those in_ports that
may unblock an address, must wake up the stalled messages. Alot of this
complexity is handled in slicc and the specification files simply
annotate the in_ports.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/slicc/ast/CheckAllocateStatementAST.py => src/mem/slicc/ast/StallAndWaitStatementAST.py
rename : src/mem/slicc/ast/CheckAllocateStatementAST.py => src/mem/slicc/ast/WakeUpDependentsStatementAST.py
One big difference is that PrioHeap puts the smallest element at the
top of the heap, whereas stl puts the largest element on top, so I
changed all comparisons so they did the right thing.
Some usage of PrioHeap was simply changed to a std::vector, using sort
at the right time, other usage had me just use the various heap functions
in the stl.
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.
In addition to obvious changes, this required a slight change to the slicc
grammar to allow types with :: in them. Otherwise slicc barfs on std::string
which we need for the headers that slicc generates.
This was done with an automated process, so there could be things that were
done in this tree in the past that didn't make it. One known regression
is that atomic memory operations do not seem to work properly anymore.
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.
