This patch is a very straight-forward simplification, removing the
unecessary otherPort pointer from the cache port. The pointer was only
used to forward range changes, and the address range is fixed for the
cache. Removing the pointer simplifies the transition to master/slave
ports.
This patch simplifies the address-range determination mechanism and
also unifies the naming across ports and devices. It further splits
the queries for determining if a port is snooping and what address
ranges it responds to (aiming towards a separation of
cache-maintenance ports and pure memory-mapped ports). Default
behaviours are such that most ports do not have to define isSnooping,
and master ports need not implement getAddrRanges.
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
This change fixes the problem for all the cases we actively use. If you want to try
more creative I/O device attachments (E.g. sharing an L2), this won't work. You
would need another level of caching between the I/O device and the cache
(which you actually need anyway with our current code to make sure writes
propagate). This is required so that you can mark the cache in between as
top level and it won't try to send ownership of a block to the I/O device.
Asserts have been added that should catch any issues.
Allow lower-level caches (e.g., L2 or L3) to pass exclusive
copies to higher levels (e.g., L1). This eliminates a lot
of unnecessary upgrade transactions on read-write sequences
to non-shared data.
Also some cleanup of MSHR coherence handling and multiple
bug fixes.
On the config end, if a shared L2 is created for the system, it is
parameterized to have n sharers as defined by option.num_cpus. In addition to
making the cache sharing aware so that discriminating tag policies can make use
of context_ids to make decisions, I added an occupancy AverageStat and an occ %
stat to each cache so that you could know which contexts are occupying how much
cache on average, both in terms of blocks and percentage. Note that since
devices have context_id -1, having an array of occ stats that correspond to
each context_id will break here, so in FS mode I add an extra bucket for device
blocks. This bucket is explicitly not added in SE mode in order to not only
avoid ugliness in the stats.txt file, but to avoid broken stats (some formulas
break when a bucket is 0).
Previously there was one per bus, which caused some coherence problems
when more than one decided to respond. Now there is just one on
the main memory bus. The default bus responder on all other buses
is now the downstream cache's cpu_side port. Caches no longer need
to do address range filtering; instead, we just have a simple flag
to prevent snoops from propagating to the I/O bus.
Apparently we broke it with the cache rewrite and never noticed.
Thanks to Bao Yungang <baoyungang@gmail.com> for a significant part
of these changes (and for inspiring me to work on the rest).
Some other overdue cleanup on the prefetch code too.
