The changeset ad9c042dce54 made changes to the structures under the network
directory to use a map of buffers instead of vector of buffers.
The reasoning was that not all vnets that are created are used and we
needlessly allocate more buffers than required and then iterate over them
while processing network messages. But the move to map resulted in a slow
down which was pointed out by Andreas Hansson. This patch moves things
back to using vector of message buffers.
This patch is the final patch in a series of patches. The aim of the series
is to make ruby more configurable than it was. More specifically, the
connections between controllers are not at all possible (unless one is ready
to make significant changes to the coherence protocol). Moreover the buffers
themselves are magically connected to the network inside the slicc code.
These connections are not part of the configuration file.
This patch makes changes so that these connections will now be made in the
python configuration files associated with the protocols. This requires
each state machine to expose the message buffers it uses for input and output.
So, the patch makes these buffers configurable members of the machines.
The patch drops the slicc code that usd to connect these buffers to the
network. Now these buffers are exposed to the python configuration system
as Master and Slave ports. In the configuration files, any master port
can be connected any slave port. The file pyobject.cc has been modified to
take care of allocating the actual message buffer. This is inline with how
other port connections work.
The previous changeset (9863:9483739f83ee) used STL vector containers to
dynamically allocate stats in the Ruby SimpleNetwork, Switch and Throttle. For
gcc versions before at least 4.6.3, this causes the standard vector allocator
to call Stats copy constructors (a no-no, since stats should be allocated in
the body of each SimObject instance). Since the size of these stats arrays is
known at compile time (NOTE: after code generation), this patch changes their
allocation to be static rather than using an STL vector.
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.
Many Ruby structures inherit from the Consumer, which is used for scheduling
events. The Consumer used to relay on an Event Manager for scheduling events
and on g_system_ptr for time. With this patch, the Consumer will now use a
ClockedObject to schedule events and to query for current time. This resulted
in several structures being converted from SimObjects to ClockedObjects. Also,
the MessageBuffer class now requires a pointer to a ClockedObject so as to
query for time.
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 patch removes some of the unused typedefs. It also moves
some of the typedefs from Global.hh to TypeDefines.hh. The patch
also eliminates the file NodeID.hh.
Moved the buffer_size, endpoint_bandwidth, and adaptive_routing params out of
the top-level parent network object and to only those networks that actually
use those parameters.
Overall, continue to progress Ruby debug messages to more of the normal M5
debug message style
- add a name() to the Ruby Throttle & PerfectSwitch objects so that the debug output
isn't littered w/"global:" everywhere.
- clean up messages that print over multiple lines when possible
- clean up duplicate prints in the message buffer
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.
This was done with an automated process, so there could be things that were
done in this tree in the past that didn't make it. One known regression
is that atomic memory operations do not seem to work properly anymore.
This basically means changing all #include statements and changing
autogenerated code so that it generates the correct paths. Because
slicc generates #includes, I had to hard code the include paths to
mem/protocol.
