In the current caches the hit latency is paid twice on a miss. This patch lets
a configurable response latency be set of the cache for the backward path.
This patch is a first step to using Cycles as a parameter type. The
main affected modules are the CPUs and the Ruby caches. There are
definitely plenty more places that are affected, but this patch serves
as a starting point to making the transition.
An important part of this patch is to actually enable parameters to be
specified as Param.Cycles which involves some changes to params.py.
This patch classifies all ports in Python as either Master or Slave
and enforces a binding of master to slave. Conceptually, a master (such
as a CPU or DMA port) issues requests, and receives responses, and
conversely, a slave (such as a memory or a PIO device) receives
requests and sends back responses. Currently there is no
differentiation between coherent and non-coherent masters and slaves.
The classification as master/slave also involves splitting the dual
role port of the bus into a master and slave port and updating all the
system assembly scripts to use the appropriate port. Similarly, the
interrupt devices have to have their int_port split into a master and
slave port. The intdev and its children have minimal changes to
facilitate the extra port.
Note that this patch does not enforce any port typing in the C++
world, it merely ensures that the Python objects have a notion of the
port roles and are connected in an appropriate manner. This check is
carried when two ports are connected, e.g. bus.master =
memory.port. The following patches will make use of the
classifications and specialise the C++ ports into masters and slaves.
This patch fixes the cache stats to use the new request ids.
Cache stats also display the requestor names in the vector subnames.
Most cache stats now include "nozero" and "nonan" flags to reduce the
amount of excessive cache stat dump. Also, simplified
incMissCount()/incHitCount() functions.
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.
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).
This prevents redundant prefetches from being issued, solving the
occasional 'needsExclusive && !blk->isWritable()' assertion failure
in cache_impl.hh that several people have run into.
Eliminates "prefetch_cache_check_push" flag, neither setting of
which really solved the problem.
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.
supposed to and make sure parameters have the right type.
Also make sure that any object that should be an intermediate
type has the right options set.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : d56910628d9a067699827adbc0a26ab629d11e93
