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.
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.
The main purpose for clearing stats in the unserialize process is so
that the profiler can correctly set its start time to the unserialized
value of curTick.
This patch adds back to ruby the capability to understand the response time
for messages that hit in different levels of the cache heirarchy.
Specifically add support for the MI_example, MOESI_hammer, and MOESI_CMP_token
protocols.
This patch adds DMA testing to the Memtester and is inherits many changes from
Polina's old tester_dma_extension patch. Since Ruby does not work in atomic
mode, the atomic mode options are removed.
This was somewhat tricky because the RefCnt API was somewhat odd. The
biggest confusion was that the the RefCnt object's constructor that
took a TYPE& cloned the object. I created an explicit virtual clone()
function for things that took advantage of this version of the
constructor. I was conservative and used clone() when I was in doubt
of whether or not it was necessary. I still think that there are
probably too many instances of clone(), but hopefully not too many.
I converted several instances of const MsgPtr & to a simple MsgPtr.
If the function wants to avoid the overhead of creating another
reference, then it should just use a regular pointer instead of a ref
counting ptr.
There were a couple of instances where refcounted objects were created
on the stack. This seems pretty dangerous since if you ever
accidentally make a reference to that object with a ref counting
pointer, bad things are bound to happen.
In addition to obvious changes, this required a slight change to the slicc
grammar to allow types with :: in them. Otherwise slicc barfs on std::string
which we need for the headers that slicc generates.
Previously, the set size was set to 4. This was mostly do to the fact that a
crazy graduate student use to create networks with 256 l2 cache banks. Now it
is far more likely that users will create systems with less than 64 of any
particular controller type. Therefore Ruby should be optimized for a set size
of 1.
Cleaned up the ruby profilers by moving the memory controller profiling code
out of the main profiler object and into a separate object similar to the
current CacheProfiler. Both the CacheProfiler and MemCntrlProfiler are
specific to a particular Ruby object, CacheMemory and MemoryControl
respectively. Therefore, these profilers should not be SimObjects and
created by the python configuration system, but instead private objects. This
simplifies the creation of these profilers.
Modified ruby's tracing support to no longer rely on the RubySystem map
to convert a sequencer string name to a sequencer pointer. As a
temporary solution, the code uses the sim_object find function.
Eventually, we should develop a better fix.
This patch includes a rather substantial change to the memory controller
profiler in order to work with the new configuration system. Most
noteably, the mem_cntrl_profiler no longer uses a string map, but instead
a vector. Eventually this support should be removed from the main
profiler and go into a separate object. Each memory controller should have
a pointer to that new mem_cntrl profile object.
