This patch adds an additional level of ports in the inheritance
hierarchy, separating out the protocol-specific and protocl-agnostic
parts. All the functionality related to the binding of ports is now
confined to use BaseMaster/BaseSlavePorts, and all the
protocol-specific parts stay in the Master/SlavePort. In the future it
will be possible to add other protocol-specific implementations.
The functions used in the binding of ports, i.e. getMaster/SlavePort
now use the base classes, and the index parameter is updated to use
the PortID typedef with the symbolic InvalidPortID as the default.
This patch removes the NACK frrom the packet as there is no longer any
module in the system that issues them (the bridge was the only one and
the previous patch removes that).
The handling of NACKs was mostly avoided throughout the code base, by
using e.g. panic or assert false, but in a few locations the NACKs
were actually dealt with (although NACKs never occured in any of the
regressions). Most notably, the DMA port will now never receive a NACK
and the backoff time is thus never changed. As a consequence, the
entire backoff mechanism (similar to a PCI bus) is now removed and the
DMA port entirely relies on the bus performing the arbitration and
issuing a retry when appropriate. This is more in line with e.g. PCIe.
Surprisingly, this patch has no impact on any of the regressions. As
mentioned in the patch that removes the NACK from the bridge, a
follow-up patch should change the request and response buffer size for
at least one regression to also verify that the system behaves as
expected when the bridge fills up.
This patch moves send/recvTiming and send/recvTimingSnoop from the
Port base class to the MasterPort and SlavePort, and also splits them
into separate member functions for requests and responses:
send/recvTimingReq, send/recvTimingResp, and send/recvTimingSnoopReq,
send/recvTimingSnoopResp. A master port sends requests and receives
responses, and also receives snoop requests and sends snoop
responses. A slave port has the reciprocal behaviour as it receives
requests and sends responses, and sends snoop requests and receives
snoop responses.
For all MemObjects that have only master ports or slave ports (but not
both), e.g. a CPU, or a PIO device, this patch merely adds more
clarity to what kind of access is taking place. For example, a CPU
port used to call sendTiming, and will now call
sendTimingReq. Similarly, a response previously came back through
recvTiming, which is now recvTimingResp. For the modules that have
both master and slave ports, e.g. the bus, the behaviour was
previously relying on branches based on pkt->isRequest(), and this is
now replaced with a direct call to the apprioriate member function
depending on the type of access. Please note that send/recvRetry is
still shared by all the timing accessors and remains in the Port base
class for now (to maintain the current bus functionality and avoid
changing the statistics of all regressions).
The packet queue is split into a MasterPort and SlavePort version to
facilitate the use of the new timing accessors. All uses of the
PacketQueue are updated accordingly.
With this patch, the type of packet (request or response) is now well
defined for each type of access, and asserts on pkt->isRequest() and
pkt->isResponse() are now moved to the appropriate send member
functions. It is also worth noting that sendTimingSnoopReq no longer
returns a boolean, as the semantics do not alow snoop requests to be
rejected or stalled. All these assumptions are now excplicitly part of
the port interface itself.
This change also adjusts the TlbEntry class so that it stores the number of
address bits wide a page is rather than its size in bytes. In other words,
instead of storing 4K for a 4K page, it stores 12. 12 is easy to turn into 4K,
but it's a little harder going the other way.
This patch simplifies the packet by removing the broadcast flag and
instead more firmly relying on (and enforcing) the semantics of
transactions in the classic memory system, i.e. request packets are
routed from a master to a slave based on the address, and when they
are created they have neither a valid source, nor destination. On
their way to the slave, the request packet is updated with a source
field for all modules that multiplex packets from multiple master
(e.g. a bus). When a request packet is turned into a response packet
(at the final slave), it moves the potentially populated source field
to the destination field, and the response packet is routed through
any multiplexing components back to the master based on the
destination field.
Modules that connect multiplexing components, such as caches and
bridges store any existing source and destination field in the sender
state as a stack (just as before).
The packet constructor is simplified in that there is no longer a need
to pass the Packet::Broadcast as the destination (this was always the
case for the classic memory system). In the case of Ruby, rather than
using the parameter to the constructor we now rely on setDest, as
there is already another three-argument constructor in the packet
class.
In many places where the packet information was printed as part of
DPRINTFs, request packets would be printed with a numeric "dest" that
would always be -1 (Broadcast) and that field is now removed from the
printing.
This patch introduces port access methods that separates snoop
request/responses from normal memory request/responses. The
differentiation is made for functional, atomic and timing accesses and
builds on the introduction of master and slave ports.
Before the introduction of this patch, the packets belonging to the
different phases of the protocol (request -> [forwarded snoop request
-> snoop response]* -> response) all use the same port access
functions, even though the snoop packets flow in the opposite
direction to the normal packet. That is, a coherent master sends
normal request and receives responses, but receives snoop requests and
sends snoop responses (vice versa for the slave). These two distinct
phases now use different access functions, as described below.
Starting with the functional access, a master sends a request to a
slave through sendFunctional, and the request packet is turned into a
response before the call returns. In a system without cache coherence,
this is all that is needed from the functional interface. For the
cache-coherent scenario, a slave also sends snoop requests to coherent
masters through sendFunctionalSnoop, with responses returned within
the same packet pointer. This is currently used by the bus and caches,
and the LSQ of the O3 CPU. The send/recvFunctional and
send/recvFunctionalSnoop are moved from the Port super class to the
appropriate subclass.
Atomic accesses follow the same flow as functional accesses, with
request being sent from master to slave through sendAtomic. In the
case of cache-coherent ports, a slave can send snoop requests to a
master through sendAtomicSnoop. Just as for the functional access
methods, the atomic send and receive member functions are moved to the
appropriate subclasses.
The timing access methods are different from the functional and atomic
in that requests and responses are separated in time and
send/recvTiming are used for both directions. Hence, a master uses
sendTiming to send a request to a slave, and a slave uses sendTiming
to send a response back to a master, at a later point in time. Snoop
requests and responses travel in the opposite direction, similar to
what happens in functional and atomic accesses. With the introduction
of this patch, it is possible to determine the direction of packets in
the bus, and no longer necessary to look for both a master and a slave
port with the requested port id.
In contrast to the normal recvFunctional, recvAtomic and recvTiming
that are pure virtual functions, the recvFunctionalSnoop,
recvAtomicSnoop and recvTimingSnoop have a default implementation that
calls panic. This is to allow non-coherent master and slave ports to
not implement these functions.
This patch introduces the notion of a master and slave port in the C++
code, thus bringing the previous classification from the Python
classes into the corresponding simulation objects and memory objects.
The patch enables us to classify behaviours into the two bins and add
assumptions and enfore compliance, also simplifying the two
interfaces. As a starting point, isSnooping is confined to a master
port, and getAddrRanges to slave ports. More of these specilisations
are to come in later patches.
The getPort function is not getMasterPort and getSlavePort, and
returns a port reference rather than a pointer as NULL would never be
a valid return value. The default implementation of these two
functions is placed in MemObject, and calls fatal.
The one drawback with this specific patch is that it requires some
code duplication, e.g. QueuedPort becomes QueuedMasterPort and
QueuedSlavePort, and BusPort becomes BusMasterPort and BusSlavePort
(avoiding multiple inheritance). With the later introduction of the
port interfaces, moving the functionality outside the port itself, a
lot of the duplicated code will disappear again.
This change adds a master id to each request object which can be
used identify every device in the system that is capable of issuing a request.
This is part of the way to removing the numCpus+1 stats in the cache and
replacing them with the master ids. This is one of a series of changes
that make way for the stats output to be changed to python.
This patch simplifies the address-range determination mechanism and
also unifies the naming across ports and devices. It further splits
the queries for determining if a port is snooping and what address
ranges it responds to (aiming towards a separation of
cache-maintenance ports and pure memory-mapped ports). Default
behaviours are such that most ports do not have to define isSnooping,
and master ports need not implement getAddrRanges.
At the same time, rename the trace flags to debug flags since they
have broader usage than simply tracing. This means that
--trace-flags is now --debug-flags and --trace-help is now --debug-help
Move page table walker state to its own object type, and make the
walker instantiate state for each outstanding walk. By storing the
states in a queue, the walker is able to handle multiple outstanding
timing requests. Note that functional walks use separate state
elements.
