CPU switching consists of the following steps:
1. Drain the system
2. Switch out old CPUs (cpu.switchOut())
3. Change the system timing mode to the mode the new CPUs require
4. Flush caches if switching to hardware virtualization
5. Inform new CPUs of the handover (cpu.takeOverFrom())
6. Resume the system
m5.switchCpus() previously only did step 2 & 5. Since information
about the new processors' memory system requirements is now exposed,
do all of the steps above.
This patch adds automatic memory system switching and flush (if
needed) to switchCpus(). Additionally, it adds optional draining to
switchCpus(). This has the following implications:
* changeToTiming and changeToAtomic are no longer needed, so they have
been removed.
* changeMemoryMode is only used internally, so it is has been renamed
to be private.
* switchCpus requires a reference to the system containing the CPUs as
its first parameter.
WARNING: This changeset breaks compatibility with existing
configuration scripts since it changes the signature of
m5.switchCpus().
This patch moves the default DRAM parameters from the SimpleDRAM class
to two different subclasses, one for DDR3 and one for LPDDR2. More can
be added as we go forward.
The regressions that previously used the SimpleDRAM are now using
SimpleDDR3 as this is the most similar configuration.
The actual statistical values are being updated for only two tests belonging
to sparc architecture and inorder cpu: 00.hello and 02.insttest. For others
the patch updates config.ini and name changes to statistical variables.
This changeset adds a set of tests that stress the CPU switching
code. It adds the following test configurations:
* tsunami-switcheroo-full -- Alpha system (atomic, timing, O3)
* realview-switcheroo-atomic -- ARM system (atomic<->atomic)
* realview-switcheroo-timing -- ARM system (timing<->timing)
* realview-switcheroo-o3 -- ARM system (O3<->O3)
* realview-switcheroo-full -- ARM system (atomic, timing, O3)
Reference data is provided for the 10.linux-boot test case. All of the
tests trigger a CPU switch once per millisecond during the boot
process.
The in-order CPU model was not included in any of the tests as it does
not support CPU handover.
This patch generalises the address range resolution for the I/O cache
and I/O bridge such that they do not assume a single memory. The patch
involves adding a parameter to the system which is then defined based
on the memories that are to be visible from the I/O subsystem, whether
behind a cache or a bridge.
The change is needed to allow interleaved memory controllers in the
system.
This patch adds support for reading input traces encoded using
protobuf according to what is done in the CommMonitor.
A follow-up patch adds a Python script that can be used to convert the
previously used ASCII traces to protobuf equivalents. The appropriate
regression input is updated as part of this patch.
The EIO tests depend on the EIO support from the "encumbered"
repository, which means that they are not normally built with
gem5. This causes all EIO related tests to fail, which is both
annoying and confusing. This patch addresses this by adding support
for skipping tests if certain conditions (e.g., the presence of a
SimObject) can not be met. It introduces the following Python
functions that can be called from within a test case:
* skip_test -- Skip a test and optionally print why the test was
skipped.
* has_sim_object -- Test if a SimObject exists.
* require_sim_object -- Test if a SimObject exists and skip, or
optionally fail, the test if not.
Additionally, this patch updates the EIO tests to check for the
presence of EioProcess.
This patch adds packet tracing to the communication monitor using a
protobuf as the mechanism for creating the trace.
If no file is specified, then the tracing is disabled. If a file is
specified, then for every packet that is successfully sent, a protobuf
message is serialized to the file.
This patch changes the traffic generator period such that it does not
completely saturate the DRAM controller and create an ever-growing
backlog in the queued port.
A separate patch updates the stats.
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.
Previous to this change we didn't always set the memory mode which worked as
long as we never attempted to switch CPUs or checked that a CPU was in a
memory system with the correct mode. Future changes will make CPUs verify
that they're operating in the correct mode and thus we need to always set it.
Most of the test cases currently contain a large amount of duplicated
boiler plate code. This changeset introduces a set of classes that
encapsulates most of the functionality when setting up a test
configuration.
The following base classes are introduced:
* BaseSystem - Basic system configuration that can be used for both
SE and FS simulation.
* BaseFSSystem - Basic FS configuration uni-processor and multi-processor
configurations.
* BaseFSSystemUniprocessor - Basic FS configuration for uni-processor
configurations. This is provided as a way
to make existing test cases backwards
compatible.
Architecture specific implementations are provided for ARM, Alpha, and
X86.
This patch unified the L1 and L2 caches used throughout the
regressions instead of declaring different, but very similar,
configurations in the different scripts.
The patch also changes the default L2 configuration to match what it
used to be for the fs and se scripts (until the last patch that
updated the regressions to also make use of the cache config). The
MSHRs and targets per MSHR are now set to a more realistic default of
20 and 12, respectively.
As a result of both the aforementioned changes, many of the regression
stats are changed. A follow-on patch will bump the stats.
This patch updates the stats to reflect the change in the default
system clock from 1 THz to 1GHz. The changes are due to the DMA
devices now injecting requests at a lower pace.
This patch bumps the stats to match the use of SimpleDRAM instead of
SimpleMemory in all inorder and O3 regressions, and also all
full-system regressions. A number of performance-related stats change,
and a whole bunch of stats are added for the memory controller.
This patch favours using SimpleDRAM with the default timing instead of
SimpleMemory for all regressions that involve the o3 or inorder CPU,
or are full system (in other words, where the actual performance of
the memory is important for the overall performance).
Moving forward, the solution for FSConfig and the users of fs.py and
se.py is probably something similar to what we use to choose the CPU
type. I envision a few pre-set configurations SimpleLPDDR2,
SimpleDDR3, etc that can be choosen by a dram_type option. Feedback on
this part is welcome.
This patch changes plenty stats and adds all the DRAM controller
related stats. A follow-on patch updates the relevant statistics. The
total run-time for the entire regression goes up with ~5% with this
patch due to the added complexity of the SimpleDRAM model. This is a
concious trade-off to ensure that the model is properly tested.
This patch uses the common L1, L2 and IOCache configuration for the
regressions that all share the same cache parameters. There are a few
regressions that use a slightly different configuration (memtest,
o3-timing=mp, simple-atomic-mp and simple-timing-mp), and the latter
are not changed in this patch. They will be updated in a future patch.
The common cache configurations are changed to match the ones used in
the regressions, and are slightly changed with respect to what they
were. Hopefully this means we can converge on a common base
configuration, used both in the normal user configurations and
regressions.
As only regressions that shared the same cache configuration are
updated, no regressions are affected.
This patch updates the stats to reflect the change in how cache
latencies are expressed. In addition, the latencies are now rounded to
multiples of the clock period, thus also affecting other stats.
This patch changes the cache-related latencies from an absolute time
expressed in Ticks, to a number of cycles that can be scaled with the
clock period of the caches. Ultimately this patch serves to enable
future work that involves dynamic frequency scaling. As an immediate
benefit it also makes it more convenient to specify cache performance
without implicitly assuming a specific CPU core operating frequency.
The stat blocked_cycles that actually counter in ticks is now updated
to count in cycles.
As the timing is now rounded to the clock edges of the cache, there
are some regressions that change. Plenty of them have very minor
changes, whereas some regressions with a short run-time are perturbed
quite significantly. A follow-on patch updates all the statistics for
the regressions.
This patch changes the memtest clock from 1THz (the default) to 2GHz,
similar to the CPUs in the other regressions. This is useful as the
caches will adopt the same clock as the CPU. The bus clock rate is
scaled accordingly, and the L1-L2 bus is kept at the CPU clock while
the memory bus is at half that frequency.
A separate patch updates the affected stats.
