This patch adds a basic starvation-prevention mechanism where a DRAM
page is forced to close after a certain number of accesses. The limit
is combined with the open and open-adaptive page policy and if reached
causes an auto-precharge.
This patch changes the triggering condition for the write draining
such that we grab the opportunity to issue writes if there are no
reads waiting (as opposed to waiting for the writes to reach the high
threshold). As a result, we potentially drain some of the writes in read
idle periods (if any).
A low threshold is added to be able to control how many write bursts
are kept in the memory controller queue (acting as on-chip storage).
The high and low thresholds are updated to sensible values for a 32/64
size write buffer. Note that the thresholds should be adjusted along
with the queue sizes.
This patch also adds some basic initialisation sanity checks and moves
part of the initialisation to the constructor.
This patch adds the row bits to the name of the address mapping
schemes to make it more clear that all the current schemes places the
row bits as the most significant bits.
This patch moves the Ruby-related debug flags to the ruby
sub-directory, and also removes the state SConsopts that add the
no-longer-used NO_VECTOR_BOUNDS_CHECK.
Each consumer object maintains a set of tick values when the object is supposed
to wakeup and do some processing. As of now, the object accesses this set both
when scheduling a wakeup event and when the object actually wakes up. The set
is accessed during wakeup to remove the current tick value from the set. This
functionality is now being moved to the scheduling function where ticks are
removed at a later time.
This helps in configuring the network interfaces from the python script and
these objects no longer rely on the network object for the timing information.
Piobus was recently added to se scripts for ruby so that the interrupt
controller can be connected to something (required since the interrupt
controller sends address range messages). This patch removes the piobus
and instead, the pio port of ruby port will now ignore the range change
messages in se mode.
This patch fixes an assert condition that is not true at all
times. There are valid situations that arise in dual-core
dual-workload runs where the assert condition is false. The function
call following the assert however needs to be called only when the
condition is true (a block cannot be invalidated in the tags structure
if has not been allocated in the structure, and the tempBlock is never
allocated). Hence the 'assert' has been replaced with an 'if'.
Couple of users observed segmentation fault when the simulator tries to
register the statistical variable m_IncompleteTimes. It seems that there
is some problem with the initialization of these variables when allocated
in the constructor.
Currently, the interrupt controller in x86 is connected to the io bus
directly. Therefore the packets between the io devices and the interrupt
controller do not go through ruby. This patch changes ruby port so that
these packets arrive at the ruby port first, which then routes them to their
destination. Note that the patch does not make these packets go through the
ruby network. That would happen in a subsequent patch.
This patch simplfies the retry logic in the RubyPort, avoiding
redundant attributes, and enforcing more stringent checks on the
interactions with the normal ports. The patch also simplifies the
routing done by the RubyPort, using the port identifiers instead of a
heavy-weight sender state.
The patch also fixes a bug in the sending of responses from PIO
ports. Previously these responses bypassed the queue in the queued
port, and ignored the return value, potentially leading to response
packets being lost.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
Code in two of the functions was exactly the same. This patch moves
this code to a new function which is called from the two functions
mentioned initially.
At several places, there are functions that take a cycle value as input
and performs some computation. Along with each such function, another
function was being defined that simply added one more cycle to input and
computed the same function. This patch removes this second copy of the
function. Places where these functions were being called have been updated
to use the original function with argument being current cycle + 1.
Two files had been incorrectly named with a .cache suffix.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/protocol/MESI_Three_Level-L0.cache => src/mem/protocol/MESI_Three_Level-L0cache.sm
rename : src/mem/protocol/MESI_Three_Level-L1.cache => src/mem/protocol/MESI_Three_Level-L1cache.sm
This patch fixes a bug in how physical memory used to be mapped and
unmapped. Previously we unmapped and re-mapped if restoring from a
checkpoint. However, we never checked that the new mapping was
actually the same, it was just magically working as the OS seems to
fairly reliably give us the same chunk back. This patch fixes this
issue by relying entirely on the mmap call in the constructor.
This patch adds a filter to the cache to drop snoop requests that are
not for a range covered by the cache. This fixes an issue observed
when multiple caches are placed in parallel, covering different
address ranges. Without this patch, all the caches will forward the
snoop upwards, when only one should do so.
This patch adds DRAMSim2 as a memory controller by wrapping the
external library and creating a sublass of AbstractMemory that bridges
between the semantics of gem5 and the DRAMSim2 interface.
The DRAMSim2 wrapper extracts the clock period from the config
file. There is no way of extracting this information from DRAMSim2
itself, so we simply read the same config file and get it from there.
To properly model the response queue, the wrapper keeps track of how
many transactions are in the actual controller, and how many are
stacking up waiting to be sent back as responses (in the wrapper). The
latter requires us to move away from the queued port and manage the
packets ourselves. This is due to DRAMSim2 not having any flow control
on the response path.
DRAMSim2 assumes that the transactions it is given are matching the
burst size of the choosen memory. The wrapper checks to ensure the
cache line size of the system matches the burst size of DRAMSim2 as
there are currently no provisions to split the system requests. In
theory we could allow a cache line size smaller than the burst size,
but that would lead to inefficient use of the DRAM, so for not we
fatal also in this case.
Forces the prefetcher to mispredict twice in a row before resetting the
confidence of prefetching. This helps cases where a load PC strides by a
constant factor, however it may operate on different arrays at times.
Avoids the cost of retraining. Primarily helps with small iteration loops.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
For systems with a tightly coupled L2, a stride-based prefetcher may observe
access requests from both instruction and data L1 caches. However, the PC
address of an instruction miss gives no relevant training information to the
stride based prefetcher(there is no stride to train). In theses cases, its
better if the L2 stride prefetcher simply reverted back to a simple N-block
ahead prefetcher. This patch enables this option.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch extends the classic prefetcher to work on non-block aligned
addresses. Because the existing prefetchers in gem5 mask off the lower
address bits of cache accesses, many predictable strides fail to be
detected. For example, if a load were to stride by 48 bytes, with 64 byte
cachelines, the current stride based prefetcher would see an access pattern
of 0, 64, 64, 128, 192.... Thus not detecting a constant stride pattern. This
patch fixes this, by training the prefetcher on access and not masking off the
lower address bits.
It also adds the following configuration options:
1) Training/prefetching only on cache misses,
2) Training/prefetching only on data acceses,
3) Optionally tagging prefetches with a PC address.
#3 allows prefetchers to train off of prefetch requests in systems with
multiple cache levels and PC-based prefetchers present at multiple levels.
It also effectively allows a pipelining of prefetch requests (like in POWER4)
across multiple levels of cache hierarchy.
Improves performance on my gem5 configuration by 4.3% for SPECINT and 4.7% for SPECFP (geomean).
The patch
(1) removes the redundant writeback argument from findVictim()
(2) fixes the description of access() function
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
Adds very basic statistics on the number of tag and data accesses within the
cache, which is important for power modelling. For the tags, simply count
the associativity of the cache each time. For the data, this depends on
whether tags and data are accessed sequentially, which is given by a new
parameter. In the parallel case, all data blocks are accessed each time, but
with sequential accesses, a single data block is accessed only on a hit.
This patch enables tracking of cache occupancy per thread along with
ages (in buckets) per cache blocks. Cache occupancy stats are
recalculated on each stat dump.
