The purpose of this patch is to change the way CacheMemory interfaces with
coherence protocols. Currently, whenever a cache controller (defined in the
protocol under consideration) needs to carry out any operation on a cache
block, it looks up the tag hash map and figures out whether or not the block
exists in the cache. In case it does exist, the operation is carried out
(which requires another lookup). As observed through profiling of different
protocols, multiple such lookups take place for a given cache block. It was
noted that the tag lookup takes anything from 10% to 20% of the simulation
time. In order to reduce this time, this patch is being posted.
I have to acknowledge that the many of the thoughts that went in to this
patch belong to Brad.
Changes to CacheMemory, TBETable and AbstractCacheEntry classes:
1. The lookup function belonging to CacheMemory class now returns a pointer
to a cache block entry, instead of a reference. The pointer is NULL in case
the block being looked up is not present in the cache. Similar change has
been carried out in the lookup function of the TBETable class.
2. Function for setting and getting access permission of a cache block have
been moved from CacheMemory class to AbstractCacheEntry class.
3. The allocate function in CacheMemory class now returns pointer to the
allocated cache entry.
Changes to SLICC:
1. Each action now has implicit variables - cache_entry and tbe. cache_entry,
if != NULL, must point to the cache entry for the address on which the action
is being carried out. Similarly, tbe should also point to the transaction
buffer entry of the address on which the action is being carried out.
2. If a cache entry or a transaction buffer entry is passed on as an
argument to a function, it is presumed that a pointer is being passed on.
3. The cache entry and the tbe pointers received __implicitly__ by the
actions, are passed __explicitly__ to the trigger function.
4. While performing an action, set/unset_cache_entry, set/unset_tbe are to
be used for setting / unsetting cache entry and tbe pointers respectively.
5. is_valid() and is_invalid() has been made available for testing whether
a given pointer 'is not NULL' and 'is NULL' respectively.
6. Local variables are now available, but they are assumed to be pointers
always.
7. It is now possible for an object of the derieved class to make calls to
a function defined in the interface.
8. An OOD token has been introduced in SLICC. It is same as the NULL token
used in C/C++. If you are wondering, OOD stands for Out Of Domain.
9. static_cast can now taken an optional parameter that asks for casting the
given variable to a pointer of the given type.
10. Functions can be annotated with 'return_by_pointer=yes' to return a
pointer.
11. StateMachine has two new variables, EntryType and TBEType. EntryType is
set to the type which inherits from 'AbstractCacheEntry'. There can only be
one such type in the machine. TBEType is set to the type for which 'TBE' is
used as the name.
All the protocols have been modified to conform with the new interface.
This test exercises each of the functions in the reference counting pointer
implementation individually (except get()) and verifies they have some
minimially expected behavior. It also checks that reference counted objects
are freed when their usage count goes to 0 in some basic situations,
specifically a pointer being set to NULL and a pointer being deleted.
There's no reason for it to derive from SimLoopExitEvent.
This whole drain thing needs to be redone eventually,
but this is a stopgap to make later changes to
SimLoopExitEvent feasible.
Avoid direct references to mainEventQueue in pseudo-insts
by indirecting through associated CPU object.
Made exitSimLoop() more flexible to enable some of these.
There were several copies of similar functions that looked
like they all replicated reschedule(), so I replaced them
with direct calls. Keeping this separate from the previous
cset since there may be some subtle functional differences
if the code ever reschedules an event that is scheduled but
not squashed (though none were detected in the regressions).
Events need to be scheduled on the queue assigned
to the SimObject, not on the global queue (which
should be going away).
Also cleaned up a number of redundant expressions
that made the code unnecessarily verbose.
I like the brevity of Ali's recent change, but the ambiguity of
sometimes showing the source and sometimes the target is a little
confusing. This patch makes scons typically list all sources and
all targets for each action, with the common path prefix factored
out for brevity. It's a little more verbose now but also more
informative.
Somehow Ali talked me into adding colors too, which is a whole
'nother story.
This patch changes the manner in which data is copied from L1 to L2 cache in
the implementation of the Hammer's cache coherence protocol. Earlier, data was
copied directly from one cache entry to another. This has been broken in to
two parts. First, the data is copied from the source cache entry to a
transaction buffer entry. Then, data is copied from the transaction buffer
entry to the destination cache entry.
This has been done to maintain the invariant - at any given instant, multiple
caches under a controller are exclusive with respect to each other.
These files really aren't general enough to belong in src/base.
This patch doesn't reorder include lines, leaving them unsorted
in many cases, but Nate's magic script will fix that up shortly.
--HG--
rename : src/base/sched_list.hh => src/cpu/sched_list.hh
rename : src/base/timebuf.hh => src/cpu/timebuf.hh
Ran all the source files through 'perl -pi' with this script:
s|\s*(};?\s*)?/\*\s*(end\s*)?namespace\s*(\S+)\s*\*/(\s*})?|} // namespace $3|;
s|\s*};?\s*//\s*(end\s*)?namespace\s*(\S+)\s*|} // namespace $2\n|;
s|\s*};?\s*//\s*(\S+)\s*namespace\s*|} // namespace $1\n|;
Also did a little manual editing on some of the arch/*/isa_traits.hh files
and src/SConscript.
These operators were expecting a const T& instead of a const T*, and were not
being picked up and used by gcc in the right places as a result. Apparently no
one used these operators before. A unit test which exposed these problems,
verified the solution, and checks other basic functionality is on the way.
Two functions in src/mem/ruby/system/PerfectCacheMemory.hh, tryCacheAccess()
and cacheProbe(), end with calls to panic(). Both of these functions have
return type other than void. Any file that includes this header file fails
to compile because of the missing return statement. This patch adds dummy
values so as to avoid the compiler warnings.
This diff is for changing the way ASSERT is handled in Ruby. m5.fast
compiles out the assert statements by using the macro NDEBUG. Ruby uses the
macro RUBY_NO_ASSERT to do so. This macro has been removed and NDEBUG has
been put in its place.
The store queue doesn't need to be ISA specific and architectures can
frequently store more than an int registers worth of data. A 128 bits seems
more common, but even 256 bits may be appropriate. Pretty much anything less
than a cache line size is buildable.
For SPARC ASIs are added to the ExtMachInst. If the ASI is changed simply
marking the instruction as Serializing isn't enough beacuse that only
stops rename. This provides a mechanism to squash all the instructions
and refetch them
ARM instructions updating cumulative flags (ARM FP exceptions and saturation
flags) are not serialized.
Added aliases for ARM FP exceptions and saturation flags in FPSCR. Removed
write accesses to the FP condition codes for most ARM VFP instructions: only
VCMP and VCMPE instructions update the FP condition codes. Removed a potential
cause of seg. faults in the O3 model for NEON memory macro-ops (ARM).
New parameter forms are:
IP address in the format "a.b.c.d" where a-d are from decimal 0 to 255.
IP address with netmask which is an IP followed by "/n" where n is a netmask
length in bits from decimal 0 to 32 or by "/e.f.g.h" where e-h are from
decimal 0 to 255 and which is all 1 bits followed by all 0 bits when
represented in binary. These can also be specified as an integral IP and
netmask passed in separately.
IP address with port which is an IP followed by ":p" where p is a port index
from decimal 0 to 65535. These can also be specified as an integral IP and
port value passed in separately.
This change makes O3 flatten floating point destination registers, and also
fixes misc register flattening so that it's correctly repositioned relative to
the resized regions for integer and floating point indices.
It also fixes some overly long lines.
In the case of a split transaction and a cache that is faster than a CPU we
could get two responses before next_tick expires. Add an event that is
scheduled in this case and return false rather than asserting.
The L1 cache may have been accessed to provide this data, which confuses
it, if it ends up being accesses twice in one cycle. Instead wait 1 tick
which will force the timing simple CPU to forward to its next clock cycle
when the translation completes.
Also prevent multiple outstanding table walks from occuring at once.
This change modifies the way prefetches work. They are now like normal loads
that don't writeback a register. Previously prefetches were supposed to call
prefetch() on the exection context, so they executed with execute() methods
instead of initiateAcc() completeAcc(). The prefetch() methods for all the CPUs
are blank, meaning that they get executed, but don't actually do anything.
On Alpha dead cache copy code was removed and prefetches are now normal ops.
They count as executed operations, but still don't do anything and IsMemRef is
not longer set on them.
On ARM IsDataPrefetch or IsInstructionPreftech is now set on all prefetch
instructions. The timing simple CPU doesn't try to do anything special for
prefetches now and they execute with the normal memory code path.
The build_dir parameter name has been deprecated and replaced with
variant_dir. This change switches us over to avoid warning spew in newer
versions of scons.
This change is a low level and pervasive reorganization of how PCs are managed
in M5. Back when Alpha was the only ISA, there were only 2 PCs to worry about,
the PC and the NPC, and the lsb of the PC signaled whether or not you were in
PAL mode. As other ISAs were added, we had to add an NNPC, micro PC and next
micropc, x86 and ARM introduced variable length instruction sets, and ARM
started to keep track of mode bits in the PC. Each CPU model handled PCs in
its own custom way that needed to be updated individually to handle the new
dimensions of variability, or, in the case of ARMs mode-bit-in-the-pc hack,
the complexity could be hidden in the ISA at the ISA implementation's expense.
Areas like the branch predictor hadn't been updated to handle branch delay
slots or micropcs, and it turns out that had introduced a significant (10s of
percent) performance bug in SPARC and to a lesser extend MIPS. Rather than
perpetuate the problem by reworking O3 again to handle the PC features needed
by x86, this change was introduced to rework PC handling in a more modular,
transparent, and hopefully efficient way.
PC type:
Rather than having the superset of all possible elements of PC state declared
in each of the CPU models, each ISA defines its own PCState type which has
exactly the elements it needs. A cross product of canned PCState classes are
defined in the new "generic" ISA directory for ISAs with/without delay slots
and microcode. These are either typedef-ed or subclassed by each ISA. To read
or write this structure through a *Context, you use the new pcState() accessor
which reads or writes depending on whether it has an argument. If you just
want the address of the current or next instruction or the current micro PC,
you can get those through read-only accessors on either the PCState type or
the *Contexts. These are instAddr(), nextInstAddr(), and microPC(). Note the
move away from readPC. That name is ambiguous since it's not clear whether or
not it should be the actual address to fetch from, or if it should have extra
bits in it like the PAL mode bit. Each class is free to define its own
functions to get at whatever values it needs however it needs to to be used in
ISA specific code. Eventually Alpha's PAL mode bit could be moved out of the
PC and into a separate field like ARM.
These types can be reset to a particular pc (where npc = pc +
sizeof(MachInst), nnpc = npc + sizeof(MachInst), upc = 0, nupc = 1 as
appropriate), printed, serialized, and compared. There is a branching()
function which encapsulates code in the CPU models that checked if an
instruction branched or not. Exactly what that means in the context of branch
delay slots which can skip an instruction when not taken is ambiguous, and
ideally this function and its uses can be eliminated. PCStates also generally
know how to advance themselves in various ways depending on if they point at
an instruction, a microop, or the last microop of a macroop. More on that
later.
Ideally, accessing all the PCs at once when setting them will improve
performance of M5 even though more data needs to be moved around. This is
because often all the PCs need to be manipulated together, and by getting them
all at once you avoid multiple function calls. Also, the PCs of a particular
thread will have spatial locality in the cache. Previously they were grouped
by element in arrays which spread out accesses.
Advancing the PC:
The PCs were previously managed entirely by the CPU which had to know about PC
semantics, try to figure out which dimension to increment the PC in, what to
set NPC/NNPC, etc. These decisions are best left to the ISA in conjunction
with the PC type itself. Because most of the information about how to
increment the PC (mainly what type of instruction it refers to) is contained
in the instruction object, a new advancePC virtual function was added to the
StaticInst class. Subclasses provide an implementation that moves around the
right element of the PC with a minimal amount of decision making. In ISAs like
Alpha, the instructions always simply assign NPC to PC without having to worry
about micropcs, nnpcs, etc. The added cost of a virtual function call should
be outweighed by not having to figure out as much about what to do with the
PCs and mucking around with the extra elements.
One drawback of making the StaticInsts advance the PC is that you have to
actually have one to advance the PC. This would, superficially, seem to
require decoding an instruction before fetch could advance. This is, as far as
I can tell, realistic. fetch would advance through memory addresses, not PCs,
perhaps predicting new memory addresses using existing ones. More
sophisticated decisions about control flow would be made later on, after the
instruction was decoded, and handed back to fetch. If branching needs to
happen, some amount of decoding needs to happen to see that it's a branch,
what the target is, etc. This could get a little more complicated if that gets
done by the predecoder, but I'm choosing to ignore that for now.
Variable length instructions:
To handle variable length instructions in x86 and ARM, the predecoder now
takes in the current PC by reference to the getExtMachInst function. It can
modify the PC however it needs to (by setting NPC to be the PC + instruction
length, for instance). This could be improved since the CPU doesn't know if
the PC was modified and always has to write it back.
ISA parser:
To support the new API, all PC related operand types were removed from the
parser and replaced with a PCState type. There are two warts on this
implementation. First, as with all the other operand types, the PCState still
has to have a valid operand type even though it doesn't use it. Second, using
syntax like PCS.npc(target) doesn't work for two reasons, this looks like the
syntax for operand type overriding, and the parser can't figure out if you're
reading or writing. Instructions that use the PCS operand (which I've
consistently called it) need to first read it into a local variable,
manipulate it, and then write it back out.
Return address stack:
The return address stack needed a little extra help because, in the presence
of branch delay slots, it has to merge together elements of the return PC and
the call PC. To handle that, a buildRetPC utility function was added. There
are basically only two versions in all the ISAs, but it didn't seem short
enough to put into the generic ISA directory. Also, the branch predictor code
in O3 and InOrder were adjusted so that they always store the PC of the actual
call instruction in the RAS, not the next PC. If the call instruction is a
microop, the next PC refers to the next microop in the same macroop which is
probably not desirable. The buildRetPC function advances the PC intelligently
to the next macroop (in an ISA specific way) so that that case works.
Change in stats:
There were no change in stats except in MIPS and SPARC in the O3 model. MIPS
runs in about 9% fewer ticks. SPARC runs with 30%-50% fewer ticks, which could
likely be improved further by setting call/return instruction flags and taking
advantage of the RAS.
TODO:
Add != operators to the PCState classes, defined trivially to be !(a==b).
Smooth out places where PCs are split apart, passed around, and put back
together later. I think this might happen in SPARC's fault code. Add ISA
specific constructors that allow setting PC elements without calling a bunch
of accessors. Try to eliminate the need for the branching() function. Factor
out Alpha's PAL mode pc bit into a separate flag field, and eliminate places
where it's blindly masked out or tested in the PC.
Code in the CPUs that need a nop to carry a fault can't easily deal with a
microcoded nop. This instruction format provides for one that isn't.
--HG--
rename : src/arch/x86/isa/formats/syscall.isa => src/arch/x86/isa/formats/nop.isa
These flags were being used to identify what alignment a request needed, but
the same information is available using the request size. This change also
eliminates the isMisaligned function. If more complicated alignment checks are
needed, they can be signaled using the ASI_BITS space in the flags vector like
is currently done with ARM.
This change makes the 8250 device return the value it has for the MCR when
read instead of leaving the packet data unmodified/uninitialized. The value
the UART has for the MCR may not be right, but that's a seperate issue that
apparently hasn't caused any problems to date.
In the process make add skipFuction() to handle isa specific function skipping
instead of ifdefs and other ugliness. For almost all ABIs, 64 bit arguments can
only start in even registers. Size is now passed to getArgument() so that 32
bit systems can make decisions about register selection for 64 bit arguments.
The number argument is now passed by reference because getArgument() will need
to change it based on the size of the argument and the current argument number.
For ARM, if the argument number is odd and a 64-bit register is requested the
number must first be incremented to because all 64 bit arguments are passed
in an even argument register. Then the number will be incremented again to
access both halves of the argument.
Move generated enums into internal.params, which gets
imported into object.params, restoring backward
compatibility for scripts that expect to find them there.
If we write back an exclusive copy, we now mark it
as such, so the cache receiving the writeback can
mark its copy as exclusive. This avoids some
unnecessary upgrade requests when a cache later
tries to re-acquire exclusive access to the block.
It's not the right fix for the checkpoint deadlock problem
Brad was having, and creates another bug where the system can
deadlock on restore. Brad can't reproduce the original bug
right now, so we'll wait until it arises again and then try
to fix it the right way then.
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.
This code is no longer needed because of the preceeding change which adds a
StaticInstPtr parameter to the fault's invoke method, obviating the only use
for this pair of functions.
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.
This is necessary because versions of swig older than 1.3.39 fail to
do the right thing and try to do relative imports for everything (even
with the package= option to %module). Instead of putting params in
the m5.internal.params package, put params in the m5.internal package
and make all param modules start with param_. Same thing for
m5.internal.enums.
Also, stop importing all generated params into m5.objects. They are
not necessary and now with everything using relative imports we wound
up with pollution of the namespace (where builtin-range got overridden).
--HG--
rename : src/python/m5/internal/enums/__init__.py => src/python/m5/internal/enums.py
rename : src/python/m5/internal/params/__init__.py => src/python/m5/internal/params.py
Instead of putting all object files into m5/object/__init__.py, interrogate
the importer to find out what should be imported.
Instead of creating a single file that lists all of the embedded python
modules, use static object construction to put those objects onto a list.
Do something similar for embedded swig (C++) code.
It doesn't appear to be necessary and it is somewhat odd. I'm pretty
sure that the package parameter to %module does whatever this might
have been before. It's necessary in future revisions anyway.
Corrects an oversight in cset f97b62be544f. The fix there only
failed queued SCUpgradeReq packets that encountered an
invalidation, which meant that the upgrade had to reach the L2
cache. To handle pending requests in the L1 we must similarly
fail StoreCondReq packets too.
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.
