This patch adds a packet queue in SimpleMemory to avoid using the
packet queue in the port (and thus have no involvement in the flow
control). The port queue was bound to 100 packets, and as the
SimpleMemory is modelling both a controller and an actual RAM, it
potentially has a large number of packets in flight. There is
currently no limit on the number of packets in the memory controller,
but this could easily be added in a follow-on patch.
As a result of the added internal storage, the functional access and
draining is updated. Some minor cleaning up and renaming has also been
done.
The memtest regression changes as a result of this patch and the stats
will be updated.
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 makes a minor addition to the SimpleMemory by enforcing a
maximum data rate. The bandwidth is configurable, and a reasonable
value (12.8GB/s) has been choosen as the default.
The changes do add some complexity to the SimpleMemory, but they
should definitely be justifiable as this enables a far more realistic
setup using even this simple memory controller.
The rate regulation is done for reads and writes combined to reflect
the bidirectional data busses used by most (if not all) relevant
memories. Moreover, the regulation is done per packet as opposed to
long term, as it is the short term data rate (data bus width times
frequency) that is the limiting factor.
A follow-up patch bumps the stats for the regressions.
This patch changes the simple memory to have a single slave port
rather than a vector port. The simple memory makes no attempts at
modelling the contention between multiple ports, and any such
multiplexing and demultiplexing could be done in a bus (or crossbar)
outside the memory controller. This scenario also matches with the
ongoing work on a SimpleDRAM model, which will be a single-ported
single-channel controller that can be used in conjunction with a bus
(or crossbar) to create a multi-port multi-channel controller.
There are only very few regressions that make use of the vector port,
and these are all for functional accesses only. To facilitate these
cases, memtest and memtest-ruby have been updated to also have a
"functional" bus to perform the (de)multiplexing of the functional
memory accesses.
This patch removes the assumption on having on single instance of
PhysicalMemory, and enables a distributed memory where the individual
memories in the system are each responsible for a single contiguous
address range.
All memories inherit from an AbstractMemory that encompasses the basic
behaviuor of a random access memory, and provides untimed access
methods. What was previously called PhysicalMemory is now
SimpleMemory, and a subclass of AbstractMemory. All future types of
memory controllers should inherit from AbstractMemory.
To enable e.g. the atomic CPU and RubyPort to access the now
distributed memory, the system has a wrapper class, called
PhysicalMemory that is aware of all the memories in the system and
their associated address ranges. This class thus acts as an
infinitely-fast bus and performs address decoding for these "shortcut"
accesses. Each memory can specify that it should not be part of the
global address map (used e.g. by the functional memories by some
testers). Moreover, each memory can be configured to be reported to
the OS configuration table, useful for populating ATAG structures, and
any potential ACPI tables.
Checkpointing support currently assumes that all memories have the
same size and organisation when creating and resuming from the
checkpoint. A future patch will enable a more flexible
re-organisation.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/AbstractMemory.py
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/SimpleMemory.py
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/abstract_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/abstract_mem.hh
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/simple_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/simple_mem.hh
