This patch changes MessageBuffer and TimerTable, two structures used for
buffering messages by components in ruby. These structures would no longer
maintain pointers to clock objects. Functions in these structures have been
changed to take as input current time in Tick. Similarly, these structures
will not operate on Cycle valued latencies for different operations. The
corresponding functions would need to be provided with these latencies by
components invoking the relevant functions. These latencies should also be
in Ticks.
I felt the need for these changes while trying to speed up ruby. The ultimate
aim is to eliminate Consumer class and replace it with an EventManager object in
the MessageBuffer and TimerTable classes. This object would be used for
scheduling events. The event itself would contain information on the object and
function to be invoked.
In hindsight, it seems I should have done this while I was moving away from use
of a single global clock in the memory system. That change led to introduction
of clock objects that replaced the global clock object. It never crossed my
mind that having clock object pointers is not a good design. And now I really
don't like the fact that we have separate consumer, receiver and sender
pointers in message buffers.
This patch eliminates the type Address defined by the ruby memory system.
This memory system would now use the type Addr that is in use by the
rest of the system.
This patch removes the data block present in the directory entry structure
of each protocol in gem5's mainline. Firstly, this is required for moving
towards common set of memory controllers for classic and ruby memory systems.
Secondly, the data block was being misused in several places. It was being
used for having free access to the physical memory instead of calling on the
memory controller.
From now on, the directory controller will not have a direct visibility into
the physical memory. The Memory Vector object now resides in the
Memory Controller class. This also means that some significant changes are
being made to the functional accesses in ruby.
This patch is the final patch in a series of patches. The aim of the series
is to make ruby more configurable than it was. More specifically, the
connections between controllers are not at all possible (unless one is ready
to make significant changes to the coherence protocol). Moreover the buffers
themselves are magically connected to the network inside the slicc code.
These connections are not part of the configuration file.
This patch makes changes so that these connections will now be made in the
python configuration files associated with the protocols. This requires
each state machine to expose the message buffers it uses for input and output.
So, the patch makes these buffers configurable members of the machines.
The patch drops the slicc code that usd to connect these buffers to the
network. Now these buffers are exposed to the python configuration system
as Master and Slave ports. In the configuration files, any master port
can be connected any slave port. The file pyobject.cc has been modified to
take care of allocating the actual message buffer. This is inline with how
other port connections work.
Change all occurrances of Address as a variable name to instead use Addr.
Address is an allowed name in slicc even when Address is also being used as a
type, leading to declarations of "Address Address". While this works, it
prevents adding another field of type Address because the compiler then thinks
Address is a variable name, not type.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
Addition of functional access support to Ruby necessitated some changes to
the way coherence protocols are written. I had forgotten to update the
Network_test protocol. This patch makes those updates.
The access permissions for the directory entries are not being set correctly.
This is because pointers are not used for handling directory entries.
function. get and set functions for access permissions have been added to the
Controller state machine. The changePermission() function provided by the
AbstractEntry and AbstractCacheEntry classes has been exposed to SLICC
code once again. The set_permission() functionality has been removed.
NOTE: Each protocol will have to define these get and set functions in order
to compile successfully.
Identifying response vnets versus other vnets will allow garnet to
determine which vnets will carry data packets, and which will carry
ctrl packets, and use appropriate buffer sizes (since data packets are larger
than ctrl packets). This in turn allows the orion power model to accurately
estimate buffer power.
The tester code is in testers/networktest.
The tester can be invoked by configs/example/ruby_network_test.py.
A dummy coherence protocol called Network_test is also addded for network-only simulations and testing. The protocol takes in messages from the tester and just pushes them into the network in the appropriate vnet, without storing any state.
