Objects that are can be serialized are supposed to inherit from the
Serializable class. This class is meant to provide a unified API for
such objects. However, so far it has mainly been used by SimObjects
due to some fundamental design limitations. This changeset redesigns
to the serialization interface to make it more generic and hide the
underlying checkpoint storage. Specifically:
* Add a set of APIs to serialize into a subsection of the current
object. Previously, objects that needed this functionality would
use ad-hoc solutions using nameOut() and section name
generation. In the new world, an object that implements the
interface has the methods serializeSection() and
unserializeSection() that serialize into a named /subsection/ of
the current object. Calling serialize() serializes an object into
the current section.
* Move the name() method from Serializable to SimObject as it is no
longer needed for serialization. The fully qualified section name
is generated by the main serialization code on the fly as objects
serialize sub-objects.
* Add a scoped ScopedCheckpointSection helper class. Some objects
need to serialize data structures, that are not deriving from
Serializable, into subsections. Previously, this was done using
nameOut() and manual section name generation. To simplify this,
this changeset introduces a ScopedCheckpointSection() helper
class. When this class is instantiated, it adds a new /subsection/
and subsequent serialization calls during the lifetime of this
helper class happen inside this section (or a subsection in case
of nested sections).
* The serialize() call is now const which prevents accidental state
manipulation during serialization. Objects that rely on modifying
state can use the serializeOld() call instead. The default
implementation simply calls serialize(). Note: The old-style calls
need to be explicitly called using the
serializeOld()/serializeSectionOld() style APIs. These are used by
default when serializing SimObjects.
* Both the input and output checkpoints now use their own named
types. This hides underlying checkpoint implementation from
objects that need checkpointing and makes it easier to change the
underlying checkpoint storage code.
With ARMv8 support the same misc register id results in accessing different
registers depending on the current mode of the processor. This patch adds
the same orthogonality to the misc register file as the others (int, float, cc).
For all the othre ISAs this is currently a null-implementation.
Additionally, a system variable is added to all the ISA objects.
After making the ISA an independent SimObject, it is serialized
automatically by the Python world. Previously, this just resulted in
an empty ISA section. This patch moves the contents of the ISA to that
section and removes the explicit ISA serialization from the thread
contexts, which makes it behave like a normal SimObject during
serialization.
Note: This patch breaks checkpoint backwards compatibility! Use the
cpt_upgrader.py utility to upgrade old checkpoints to the new format.
The ISA class on stores the contents of ID registers on many
architectures. In order to make reset values of such registers
configurable, we make the class inherit from SimObject, which allows
us to use the normal generated parameter headers.
This patch introduces a Python helper method, BaseCPU.createThreads(),
which creates a set of ISAs for each of the threads in an SMT
system. Although it is currently only needed when creating
multi-threaded CPUs, it should always be called before instantiating
the system as this is an obvious place to configure ID registers
identifying a thread/CPU.
This reduces the scope of those includes and makes it less likely for there to
be a dependency loop. This also moves the hashing functions associated with
ExtMachInst objects to be with the ExtMachInst definitions and out of
utility.hh.
Also move the "Fault" reference counted pointer type into a separate file,
sim/fault.hh. It would be better to name this less similarly to sim/faults.hh
to reduce confusion, but fault.hh matches the name of the type. We could change
Fault to FaultPtr to match other pointer types, and then changing the name of
the file would make more sense.
