Commit graph

609 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Andreas Sandberg a3d3eb0ff7 sparc: Fixup bit ordering in the PSTATE bit union
The order of the MSB and LSB bit of the mm field in the PSTATE union
is wrong. Any access to this field will currently be ignored and reads
will always return zero. This patch fixes the ordering so it is <MSB,
LSB> instead of <LSB, MSB>.
2014-08-26 10:13:23 -04:00
Steve Reinhardt 0be64ffe2f style: eliminate equality tests with true and false
Using '== true' in a boolean expression is totally redundant,
and using '== false' is pretty verbose (and arguably less
readable in most cases) compared to '!'.

It's somewhat of a pet peeve, perhaps, but I had some time
waiting for some tests to run and decided to clean these up.

Unfortunately, SLICC appears not to have the '!' operator,
so I had to leave the '== false' tests in the SLICC code.
2014-05-31 18:00:23 -07:00
Steve Reinhardt 109908c2a6 syscall emulation: clean up & comment SyscallReturn 2014-05-12 14:23:31 -07:00
Curtis Dunham fe27f937aa arch: teach ISA parser how to split code across files
This patch encompasses several interrelated and interdependent changes
to the ISA generation step.  The end goal is to reduce the size of the
generated compilation units for instruction execution and decoding so
that batch compilation can proceed with all CPUs active without
exhausting physical memory.

The ISA parser (src/arch/isa_parser.py) has been improved so that it can
accept 'split [output_type];' directives at the top level of the grammar
and 'split(output_type)' python calls within 'exec {{ ... }}' blocks.
This has the effect of "splitting" the files into smaller compilation
units.  I use air-quotes around "splitting" because the files themselves
are not split, but preprocessing directives are inserted to have the same
effect.

Architecturally, the ISA parser has had some changes in how it works.
In general, it emits code sooner.  It doesn't generate per-CPU files,
and instead defers to the C preprocessor to create the duplicate copies
for each CPU type.  Likewise there are more files emitted and the C
preprocessor does more substitution that used to be done by the ISA parser.

Finally, the build system (SCons) needs to be able to cope with a
dynamic list of source files coming out of the ISA parser. The changes
to the SCons{cript,truct} files support this. In broad strokes, the
targets requested on the command line are hidden from SCons until all
the build dependencies are determined, otherwise it would try, realize
it can't reach the goal, and terminate in failure. Since build steps
(i.e. running the ISA parser) must be taken to determine the file list,
several new build stages have been inserted at the very start of the
build. First, the build dependencies from the ISA parser will be emitted
to arch/$ISA/generated/inc.d, which is then read by a new SCons builder
to finalize the dependencies. (Once inc.d exists, the ISA parser will not
need to be run to complete this step.) Once the dependencies are known,
the 'Environments' are made by the makeEnv() function. This function used
to be called before the build began but now happens during the build.
It is easy to see that this step is quite slow; this is a known issue
and it's important to realize that it was already slow, but there was
no obvious cause to attribute it to since nothing was displayed to the
terminal. Since new steps that used to be performed serially are now in a
potentially-parallel build phase, the pathname handling in the SCons scripts
has been tightened up to deal with chdir() race conditions. In general,
pathnames are computed earlier and more likely to be stored, passed around,
and processed as absolute paths rather than relative paths.  In the end,
some of these issues had to be fixed by inserting serializing dependencies
in the build.

Minor note:
For the null ISA, we just provide a dummy inc.d so SCons is never
compelled to try to generate it. While it seems slightly wrong to have
anything in src/arch/*/generated (i.e. a non-generated 'generated' file),
it's by far the simplest solution.
2014-05-09 18:58:47 -04:00
Geoffrey Blake 85940fd537 arch, arm: Preserve TLB bootUncacheability when switching CPUs
The ARM TLBs have a bootUncacheability flag used to make some loads
and stores become uncacheable when booting in FS mode. Later the
flag is cleared to let those loads and stores operate as normal.  When
doing a takeOverFrom(), this flag's state is not preserved and is
momentarily reset until the CPSR is touched. On single core runs this
is a non-issue. On multi-core runs this can lead to crashes on the O3
CPU model from the following series of events:
 1) takeOverFrom executed to switch from Atomic -> O3
 2) All bootUncacheability flags are reset to true
 3) Core2 tries to execute a load covered by bootUncacheability, it
    is flagged as uncacheable
 4) Core2's load needs to replay due to a pipeline flush
 3) Core1 core does an action on CPSR
 4) The handling code for CPSR then checks all other cores
    to determine if bootUncacheability can be set to false
 5) Asynchronously set bootUncacheability on all cores to false
 6) Core2 replays load previously set as uncacheable and notices
    it is now flagged as cacheable, leads to a panic.
This patch implements takeOverFrom() functionality for the ARM TLBs
to preserve flag values when switching from atomic -> detailed.
2014-05-09 18:58:47 -04:00
Curtis Dunham 7f1603d207 arch: remove inline specifiers on all inst constrs, all ISAs
With (upcoming) separate compilation, they are useless.  Only
link-time optimization could re-inline them, but ideally
feedback-directed optimization would choose to do so only for
profitable (i.e. common) instructions.
2014-05-09 18:58:46 -04:00
Andreas Hansson cfc4a99982 arch: Make all register index flattening const
This patch makes all the register index flattening methods const for
all the ISAs. As part of this, readMiscRegNoEffect for ARM is also
made const.
2014-01-24 15:29:30 -06:00
Ali Saidi 7d0344704a arch, cpu: Add support for flattening misc register indexes.
With ARMv8 support the same misc register id  results in accessing different
registers depending on the current mode of the processor. This patch adds
the same orthogonality to the misc register file as the others (int, float, cc).
For all the othre ISAs this is currently a null-implementation.

Additionally, a system variable is added to all the ISA objects.
2014-01-24 15:29:30 -06:00
Ali Saidi 6bed6e0352 cpu: Add CPU support for generatig wake up events when LLSC adresses are snooped.
This patch add support for generating wake-up events in the CPU when an address
that is currently in the exclusive state is hit by a snoop. This mechanism is required
for ARMv8 multi-processor support.
2014-01-24 15:29:30 -06:00
Yasuko Eckert 2c293823aa cpu: add a condition-code register class
Add a third register class for condition codes,
in parallel with the integer and FP classes.
No ISAs use the CC class at this point though.
2013-10-15 14:22:44 -04:00
Steve Reinhardt 219c423f1f cpu: rename *_DepTag constants to *_Reg_Base
Make these names more meaningful.

Specifically, made these substitutions:

s/FP_Base_DepTag/FP_Reg_Base/g;
s/Ctrl_Base_DepTag/Misc_Reg_Base/g;
s/Max_DepTag/Max_Reg_Index/g;
2013-10-15 14:22:43 -04:00
Steve Reinhardt a830e63de7 isa: clean up register constants
Clean up and add some consistency to the *_Base_DepTag
constants as well as some related register constants:
- Get rid of NumMiscArchRegs, TotalArchRegs, and TotalDataRegs
  since they're never used and not always defined
- Set FP_Base_DepTag = NumIntRegs when possible (i.e.,
  every case except x86)
- Set Ctrl_Base_DepTag = FP_Base_DepTag + NumFloatRegs
  (this was true before, but wasn't always expressed
  that way)
- Drastically reduce the number of arbitrary constants
  appearing in these calculations
2013-10-15 14:22:43 -04:00
Andreas Sandberg 4f5775df64 mem: Rename the ASI_BITS flag field in Request
ASI_BITS in the Request object were originally used to store a memory
request's ASI on SPARC. This is not the case any more since other ISAs
use the ASI bits to store architecture-dependent information. This
changeset renames the ASI_BITS to ARCH_BITS which better describes
their use. Additionally, the getAsi() accessor is renamed to
getArchFlags().
2013-10-15 13:26:34 +02:00
Andreas Sandberg d9856f33a4 arch: Add support for m5ops using mmapped IPRs
In order to support m5ops on virtualized CPUs, we need to either
intercept hypercall instructions or provide a memory mapped m5ops
interface. Since KVM does not normally pass the results of hypercalls
to userspace, which makes that method unfeasible. This changeset
introduces support for m5ops using memory mapped mmapped IPRs. This is
implemented by adding a class of "generic" IPRs which are handled by
architecture-independent code. Such IPRs always have bit 63 set and
are handled by handleGenericIprRead() and
handleGenericIprWrite(). Platform specific impementations of
handleIprRead and handleIprWrite should use
GenericISA::isGenericIprAccess to determine if an IPR address should
be handled by the generic code instead of the architecture-specific
code. Platforms that don't need their own IPR support can reuse
GenericISA::handleIprRead() and GenericISA::handleIprWrite().
2013-09-30 12:20:43 +02:00
Andreas Sandberg 7846f59d0d arch: Create a method to finalize physical addresses
in the TLB

Some architectures (currently only x86) require some fixing-up of
physical addresses after a normal address translation. This is usually
to remap devices such as the APIC, but could be used for other memory
mapped devices as well. When running the CPU in a using hardware
virtualization, we still need to do these address fix-ups before
inserting the request into the memory system. This patch moves this
patch allows that code to be used by such CPUs without doing full
address translations.
2013-06-03 13:55:41 +02:00
Andreas Hansson 319443d42d scons: Add warning for missing declarations
This patch enables warnings for missing declarations. To avoid issues
with SWIG-generated code, the warning is only applied to non-SWIG
code.
2013-02-19 05:56:07 -05:00
Andreas Hansson b44e0ce52b scons: Add warning for overloaded virtual functions
Fix the ISA startup warnings
2013-02-19 05:56:07 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 0acd2a96e5 scons: Add warning for overloaded virtual functions
A derived function with a different signature than a base class
function will result in the base class function of the same name being
hidden. The parameter list and return type for the member function in
the derived class must match those of the member function in the base
class, otherwise the function in the derived class will hide the
function in the base class and no polymorphic behaviour will occur.

This patch addresses these warnings by ensuring a unique function name
to avoid (unintentionally) hiding any functions.
2013-02-19 05:56:06 -05:00
Andreas Hansson d670fa60a1 scons: Add warning for missing field initializers
This patch adds a warning for missing field initializers for both gcc
and clang, and addresses the warnings that were generated.
2013-02-19 05:56:06 -05:00
Nilay Vaish fc57ae6401 x86, cpu: corrects 270c9a75e91f, take over decoder on cpu switch
The changes made by the changeset 270c9a75e91f do not work well with switching
of cpus. The problem is that decoder for the old thread context holds state
that is not taken over by the new decoder.

This patch adds a takeOverFrom() function to Decoder class in each ISA. Except
for x86, functions in other ISAs are blank. For x86, the function copies state
from the old decoder to the new decoder.
2013-01-22 00:10:10 -06:00
Nilay Vaish 25ec278a0b x86: Changes to decoder, corrects 9376
The changes made by the changeset 9376 were not quite correct. The patch made
changes to the code which resulted in decoder not getting initialized correctly
when the state was restored from a checkpoint.

This patch adds a startup function to each ISA object. For x86, this function
sets the required state in the decoder. For other ISAs, the function is empty
right now.
2013-01-12 22:09:48 -06:00
Andreas Sandberg e09e9fa279 cpu: Flush TLBs on switchOut()
This changeset inserts a TLB flush in BaseCPU::switchOut to prevent
stale translations when doing repeated switching. Additionally, the
TLB flushing functionality is exported to the Python to make debugging
of switching/checkpointing easier.

A simulation script will typically use the TLB flushing functionality
to generate a reference trace. The following sequence can be used to
simulate a handover (this depends on how drain is implemented, but is
generally the case) between identically configured CPU models:

  m5.drain(test_sys)
  [ cpu.flushTLBs() for cpu in test_sys.cpu ]
  m5.resume(test_sys)

The generated trace should normally be identical to a trace generated
when switching between identically configured CPU models or
checkpointing and resuming.
2013-01-07 13:05:48 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 17b47d35e1 arch: Move the ISA object to a separate section
After making the ISA an independent SimObject, it is serialized
automatically by the Python world. Previously, this just resulted in
an empty ISA section. This patch moves the contents of the ISA to that
section and removes the explicit ISA serialization from the thread
contexts, which makes it behave like a normal SimObject during
serialization.

Note: This patch breaks checkpoint backwards compatibility! Use the
cpt_upgrader.py utility to upgrade old checkpoints to the new format.
2013-01-07 13:05:42 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 94561dd526 arch: Add support for invalidating TLBs when draining
This patch adds support for the memInvalidate() drain method.  TLB
flushing is requested by calling the virtual flushAll() method on the
TLB.

Note: This patch renames invalidateAll() to flushAll() on x86 and
SPARC to make the interface consistent across all supported
architectures.
2013-01-07 13:05:40 -05:00
Andreas Sandberg 3db3f83a5e arch: Make the ISA class inherit from SimObject
The ISA class on stores the contents of ID registers on many
architectures. In order to make reset values of such registers
configurable, we make the class inherit from SimObject, which allows
us to use the normal generated parameter headers.

This patch introduces a Python helper method, BaseCPU.createThreads(),
which creates a set of ISAs for each of the threads in an SMT
system. Although it is currently only needed when creating
multi-threaded CPUs, it should always be called before instantiating
the system as this is an obvious place to configure ID registers
identifying a thread/CPU.
2013-01-07 13:05:35 -05:00
Ali Saidi 69d419f313 o3: Fix issue with LLSC ordering and speculation
This patch unlocks the cpu-local monitor when the CPU sees a snoop to a locked
address. Previously we relied on the cache to handle the locking for us, however
some users on the gem5 mailing list reported a case where the cpu speculatively
executes a ll operation after a pending sc operation in the pipeline and that
makes the cache monitor valid. This should handle that case by invaliding the
local monitor.
2013-01-07 13:05:33 -05:00
Gabe Black e17c375ddd Decoder: Remove the thread context get/set from the decoder.
This interface is no longer used, and getting rid of it simplifies the
decoders and code that sets up the decoders. The thread context had been used
to read architectural state which was used to contextualize the instruction
memory as it came in. That was changed so that the state is now sent to the
decoders to keep locally if/when it changes. That's significantly more
efficient.

Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
2013-01-04 19:00:45 -06:00
Gabe Black 63b10907ef SPARC: Keep a copy of the current ASI in the decoder.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
2013-01-04 18:09:45 -06:00
Andreas Sandberg c0ab52799c sim: Include object header files in SWIG interfaces
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.
2012-11-02 11:32:01 -05:00
Dam Sunwoo ac161c1d72 ISA: generic Linux thread info support
This patch takes the Linux thread info support scattered across
different ISA implementations (currently in ARM, ALPHA, and MIPS), and
unifies them into a single file.

Adds a few more helper functions to read out TGID, mm, etc.

ISA-specific information (e.g., ALPHA PCBB register) is now moved to
the corresponding isa_traits.hh files.
2012-11-02 11:32:00 -05:00
Andreas Hansson d7ad8dc608 Checkpoint: Make system serialize call children
This patch changes how the serialization of the system works. The base
class had a non-virtual serialize and unserialize, that was hidden by
a function with the same name for a number of subclasses (most likely
not intentional as the base class should have been virtual). A few of
the derived systems had no specialization at all (e.g. Power and x86
that simply called the System::serialize), but MIPS and Alpha adds
additional symbol table entries to the checkpoint.

Instead of overriding the virtual function, the additional entries are
now printed through a virtual function (un)serializeSymtab. The reason
for not calling System::serialize from the two related systems is that
a follow up patch will require the system to also serialize the
PhysicalMemory, and if this is done in the base class if ends up being
between the general parts and the specialized symbol table.

With this patch, the checkpoint is not modified, as the order of the
segments is unchanged.
2012-10-15 08:12:29 -04:00
Palle Lyckegaard 21d4d50ba1 NetBSD: Build on NetBSD
Minor patch against so building on NetBSD is possible.
2012-09-10 11:57:42 -04:00
Andreas Hansson 0cacf7e817 Clock: Add a Cycles wrapper class and use where applicable
This patch addresses the comments and feedback on the preceding patch
that reworks the clocks and now more clearly shows where cycles
(relative cycle counts) are used to express time.

Instead of bumping the existing patch I chose to make this a separate
patch, merely to try and focus the discussion around a smaller set of
changes. The two patches will be pushed together though.

This changes done as part of this patch are mostly following directly
from the introduction of the wrapper class, and change enough code to
make things compile and run again. There are definitely more places
where int/uint/Tick is still used to represent cycles, and it will
take some time to chase them all down. Similarly, a lot of parameters
should be changed from Param.Tick and Param.Unsigned to
Param.Cycles.

In addition, the use of curTick is questionable as there should not be
an absolute cycle. Potential solutions can be built on top of this
patch. There is a similar situation in the o3 CPU where
lastRunningCycle is currently counting in Cycles, and is still an
absolute time. More discussion to be had in other words.

An additional change that would be appropriate in the future is to
perform a similar wrapping of Tick and probably also introduce a
Ticks class along with suitable operators for all these classes.
2012-08-28 14:30:33 -04:00
Ali Saidi dd1b346584 sysemul: bump all linux versions of for syscal emulation to 3.0.
New tool chains seem to be looking for kernel versions newer than what
this this was previously set to. Also take this opportunity to change
the hostname we report in uname to sim.gem5.org.
2012-08-15 10:38:04 -04:00
Marc Orr 7cef6b9bef syscall emulation: Enabled getrlimit and getrusage for x86.
Added/moved rlimit constants to base linux header file.

This patch is a revised version of Vince Weaver's earlier patch.
2012-08-06 19:52:56 -07:00
Marc Orr d55115936e syscall emulation: Clean up ioctl handling, and implement for x86.
Enable different whitelists for different OS/arch combinations,
since some use the generic Linux definitions only, and others
use definitions inherited from earlier Unix flavors on those
architectures.

Also update x86 function pointers so ioctl is no longer
unimplemented on that platform.

This patch is a revised version of Vince Weaver's earlier patch.
2012-08-06 16:52:40 -07:00
Andreas Hansson 92eaac0711 gcc: Fix warnings for gcc 4.7 and clang 3.1
This patch fixes two warnings, one related to a narrowing conversion
(int to MachInst), and one due to the cast operator for arguments and
a mismatch in const-ness (const void* and void*).
2012-07-02 08:21:53 -04:00
Ali Saidi 20d25b9da7 ISA: Back-out NoopMachInst as a StaticInstPtr change. 2012-06-05 13:52:30 -04:00
Ali Saidi 6df196b71e O3: Clean up the O3 structures and try to pack them a bit better.
DynInst is extremely large the hope is that this re-organization will put the
most used members close to each other.
2012-06-05 01:23:09 -04:00
Gabe Black 008b17d816 ISA: Turn the ExtMachInst NoopMachinst into the StaticInstPtr NoopStaticInst.
This eliminates a use of the ExtMachInst type outside of the ISAs.
2012-06-04 10:57:23 -07:00
Gabe Black 19df4e94ee ISA,CPU: Generalize and split out the components of the decode cache.
This will allow it to be specialized by the ISAs. The existing caching scheme
is provided by the BasicDecodeCache in the GenericISA namespace and is built
from the generalized components.

--HG--
rename : src/cpu/decode_cache.cc => src/arch/generic/decode_cache.cc
2012-05-26 13:45:12 -07:00
Gabe Black 0cba96ba6a CPU: Merge the predecoder and decoder.
These classes are always used together, and merging them will give the ISAs
more flexibility in how they cache things and manage the process.

--HG--
rename : src/arch/x86/predecoder_tables.cc => src/arch/x86/decoder_tables.cc
2012-05-26 13:44:46 -07:00
Gabe Black eae1e97fb0 ISA: Make the decode function part of the ISA's decoder. 2012-05-25 00:55:24 -07:00
Gabe Black 82a228bd43 Decode: Make the Decoder class defined per ISA.
--HG--
rename : src/cpu/decode.cc => src/arch/generic/decoder.cc
rename : src/cpu/decode.hh => src/arch/generic/decoder.hh
2012-05-25 00:53:37 -07:00
Gabe Black 74ca8a3cd0 ISA: Put parser generated files in a "generated" directory.
This is to avoid collision with non-generated files.
2012-04-23 12:00:41 -07:00
Andreas Hansson b6aa6d55eb clang/gcc: Fix compilation issues with clang 3.0 and gcc 4.6
This patch addresses a number of minor issues that cause problems when
compiling with clang >= 3.0 and gcc >= 4.6. Most importantly, it
avoids using the deprecated ext/hash_map and instead uses
unordered_map (and similarly so for the hash_set). To make use of the
new STL containers, g++ and clang has to be invoked with "-std=c++0x",
and this is now added for all gcc versions >= 4.6, and for clang >=
3.0. For gcc >= 4.3 and <= 4.5 and clang <= 3.0 we use the tr1
unordered_map to avoid the deprecation warning.

The addition of c++0x in turn causes a few problems, as the
compiler is more stringent and adds a number of new warnings. Below,
the most important issues are enumerated:

1) the use of namespaces is more strict, e.g. for isnan, and all
   headers opening the entire namespace std are now fixed.

2) another other issue caused by the more stringent compiler is the
   narrowing of the embedded python, which used to be a char array,
   and is now unsigned char since there were values larger than 128.

3) a particularly odd issue that arose with the new c++0x behaviour is
   found in range.hh, where the operator< causes gcc to complain about
   the template type parsing (the "<" is interpreted as the beginning
   of a template argument), and the problem seems to be related to the
   begin/end members introduced for the range-type iteration, which is
   a new feature in c++11.

As a minor update, this patch also fixes the build flags for the clang
debug target that used to be shared with gcc and incorrectly use
"-ggdb".
2012-04-14 05:43:31 -04:00
Andreas Hansson b00949d88b MEM: Enable multiple distributed generalized memories
This patch removes the assumption on having on single instance of
PhysicalMemory, and enables a distributed memory where the individual
memories in the system are each responsible for a single contiguous
address range.

All memories inherit from an AbstractMemory that encompasses the basic
behaviuor of a random access memory, and provides untimed access
methods. What was previously called PhysicalMemory is now
SimpleMemory, and a subclass of AbstractMemory. All future types of
memory controllers should inherit from AbstractMemory.

To enable e.g. the atomic CPU and RubyPort to access the now
distributed memory, the system has a wrapper class, called
PhysicalMemory that is aware of all the memories in the system and
their associated address ranges. This class thus acts as an
infinitely-fast bus and performs address decoding for these "shortcut"
accesses. Each memory can specify that it should not be part of the
global address map (used e.g. by the functional memories by some
testers). Moreover, each memory can be configured to be reported to
the OS configuration table, useful for populating ATAG structures, and
any potential ACPI tables.

Checkpointing support currently assumes that all memories have the
same size and organisation when creating and resuming from the
checkpoint. A future patch will enable a more flexible
re-organisation.

--HG--
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/AbstractMemory.py
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/SimpleMemory.py
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/abstract_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/abstract_mem.hh
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/simple_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/simple_mem.hh
2012-04-06 13:46:31 -04:00
Geoffrey Blake 98cf57fb89 CheckerCPU: Add function stubs to non-ARM ISA source to compile with CheckerCPU
Making the CheckerCPU a runtime time option requires the code to be compatible
with ISAs other than ARM.  This patch adds the appropriate function
stubs to allow compilation.
2012-03-09 09:59:28 -05:00
Ali Saidi 3ce2d0fad0 System: Move code in initState() back into constructor whenever possible.
The change to port proxies recently moved code out of the constructor into
initState(). This is needed for code that loads data into memory, however
for code that setups symbol tables, kernel based events, etc this is the wrong
thing to do as that code is only called when a checkpoint isn't being restored
from.
2012-03-09 09:59:26 -05:00
Andreas Hansson 9e3c8de30b MEM: Make port proxies use references rather than pointers
This patch is adding a clearer design intent to all objects that would
not be complete without a port proxy by making the proxies members
rathen than dynamically allocated. In essence, if NULL would not be a
valid value for the proxy, then we avoid using a pointer to make this
clear.

The same approach is used for the methods using these proxies, such as
loadSections, that now use references rather than pointers to better
reflect the fact that NULL would not be an acceptable value (in fact
the code would break and that is how this patch started out).

Overall the concept of "using a reference to express unconditional
composition where a NULL pointer is never valid" could be done on a
much broader scale throughout the code base, but for now it is only
done in the locations affected by the proxies.
2012-02-24 11:45:30 -05:00