When casting objects in the generated SWIG interfaces, SWIG uses
classical C-style casts ( (Foo *)bar; ). In some cases, this can
degenerate into the equivalent of a reinterpret_cast (mainly if only a
forward declaration of the type is available). This usually works for
most compilers, but it is known to break if multiple inheritance is
used anywhere in the object hierarchy.
This patch introduces the cxx_header attribute to Python SimObject
definitions, which should be used to specify a header to include in
the SWIG interface. The header should include the declaration of the
wrapped object. We currently don't enforce header the use of the
header attribute, but a warning will be generated for objects that do
not use it.
This function duplicates the functionality of allocate() exactly, except that it does not return
a return value. In protocols where you just want to allocate a block
but do not want that block to be your implicitly passed cache_entry, use this function.
Otherwise, SLICC will complain if you do not consume the pointer returned by allocate(),
and if you do a dummy assignment Entry foo := cache.allocate(address), the C++
compiler will complain of an unused variable. This is kind of a hack to get around
those issues, but suggestions welcome.
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.
