A set of patches was recently committed to allow multiple clock domains
in ruby. In those patches, I had inadvertently made an incorrect use of
the clocks. Suppose object A needs to schedule an event on object B. It
was possible that A accesses B's clock to schedule the event. This is not
possible in actual system. Hence, changes are being to the Consumer class
so as to avoid such happenings. Note that in a multi eventq simulation,
this can possibly lead to an incorrect simulation.
There are two functions in the Consumer class that are used for scheduling
events. The first function takes in the relative delay over the current time
as the argument and adds the current time to it for scheduling the event.
The second function takes in the absolute time (in ticks) for scheduling the
event. The first function is now being moved to protected section of the
class so that only objects of the derived classes can use it. All other
objects will have to specify absolute time while scheduling an event
for some consumer.
This patch allows ruby to have multiple clock domains. As I understand
with this patch, controllers can have different frequencies. The entire
network needs to run at a single frequency.
The idea is that with in an object, time is treated in terms of cycles.
But the messages that are passed from one entity to another should contain
the time in Ticks. As of now, this is only true for the message buffers,
but not for the links in the network. As I understand the code, all the
entities in different networks (simple, garnet-fixed, garnet-flexible) should
be clocked at the same frequency.
Another problem is that the directory controller has to operate at the same
frequency as the ruby system. This is because the memory controller does
not make use of the Message Buffer, and instead implements a buffer of its
own. So, it has no idea of the frequency at which the directory controller
is operating and uses ruby system's frequency for scheduling events.
The patch started of with replacing Time with Cycles in the Consumer class.
But to get ruby to compile, the rest of the changes had to be carried out.
Subsequent patches will further this process, till we completely replace
Time with Cycles.
This patch was initiated so as to remove reference to g_system_ptr,
the pointer to Ruby System that is used for getting the current time.
That simple change actual requires changing a lot many things in slicc and
garnet. All these changes are related to how time is handled.
In most of the places, g_system_ptr has been replaced by another clock
object. The changes have been done under the assumption that all the
components in the memory system are on the same clock frequency, but the
actual clocks might be distributed.
This patch removes the use of g_system_ptr for event scheduling. Each consumer
object now needs to specify upfront an EventManager object it would use for
scheduling events. This makes the ruby memory system more amenable for a
multi-threaded simulation.
This patch removes printConfig() functions from all structures in Ruby.
Most of the information is already part of config.ini, and where ever it
is not, it would become in due course.
This is a substitute for MessageBuffers between controllers where you don't
want messages to actually go through the Network, because requests/responses can
always get reordered wrt to one another (even if you turn off Randomization and turn on Ordered)
because you are, after all, going through a network with contention. For systems where you model
multiple controllers that are very tightly coupled and do not actually go through a network,
it is a pain to have to write a coherence protocol to account for mixed up request/response orderings
despite the fact that it's completely unrealistic. This is *not* meant as a substitute for real
MessageBuffers when messages do in fact go over a network.
