This patch modifies ruby so that two controllers can be connected to each
other with only message buffers in between. Before this patch, all the
controllers had to be connected to the network for them to communicate
with each other. With this patch, one can have protocols where a controller
is not connected to the network, but communicates with another controller
through a message buffer.
The Topology class in Ruby does not need to inherit from SimObject class.
This patch turns it into a regular class. The topology object is now created
in the constructor of the Network class. All the parameters for the topology
class have been moved to the network class.
The functional write code was assuming that all writes are block sized,
which may not be true for Ruby Requests. This bug can lead to a buffer
overflow.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This check covers a case where a retry is called from the SimpleDRAM
causing a new request to appear before the DRAM itself schedules a
nextReqEvent. By adding this check, the event is not scheduled twice.
This patch adds a class method that allows easy creation of
channel-interleaved multi-channel DRAM configurations. It is enabled
by a class method to allow customisation of the class independent of
the channel configuration. For example, the user can create a MyDDR
subclass of e.g. SimpleDDR3, and then create a four-channel
configuration of the subclass by calling MyDDR.makeMultiChannel(4,
mem_start, mem_size).
This patch fixes a number of small cosmetic issues in the SimpleDRAM
module. The most important change is to move the accounting of
received packets to after the check is made if the packet should be
retried or not. Thus, packets are only counted if they are actually
accepted.
This patch adds support for multi-channel instances of the DRAM
controller model by stripping away the channel bits in the address
decoding. The patch relies on the availiability of address
interleaving and, at this time, it is up to the user to configure the
interleaving appropriately. At the moment it is assumed that the
channel interleaving bits are immediately following the column bits
(smallest sensible interleaving). Convenience methods for building
multi-channel configurations will be added later.
This patch adds merging of interleaved ranges before creating the
backing stores. The backing stores are always a contigous chunk of the
address space, and with this patch it is possible to have interleaved
memories in the system.
This patch adds basic merging of address ranges to the bus, such that
interleaved ranges are merged together before being passed on by the
bus. As such, the bus aggregates the address ranges of the connected
slave ports and then passes on the merged ranges through its master
ports. The bus thus hides the complexity of the interleaved ranges and
only exposes contigous ranges to the surrounding system.
As part of this patch, the bus ranges are also cached for any future
queries.
The MESI CMP directory coherence protocol, while transitioning from SM to IM,
did not invalidate the lock that it might have taken on a cache line. This
patch adds an action for doing so.
The problem was found by Dibakar, but I was not happy with his proposed
solution. So I implemented a different solution.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch fixes a newly introduced bug where the sender state was
popped before checking that it should be. Amazingly all regressions
pass, but Linux fails to boot on the detailed CPU with caches enabled.
This patch fixes the warnings that clang3.2svn emit due to the "-Wall"
flag. There is one case of an uninitialised value in the ARM neon ISA
description, and then a whole range of unused private fields that are
pruned.
This patch address the most important name shadowing warnings (as
produced when using gcc/clang with -Wshadow). There are many
locations where constructor parameters and function parameters shadow
local variables, but these are left unchanged.
This patch adds a check to ensure that the delay incurred by
the bus is not simply disregarded, but accounted for by someone. At
this point, all the modules do is to zero it out, and no additional
time is spent. This highlights where the bus timing is simply dropped
instead of being paid for.
As a follow up, the locations identified in this patch should add this
additional time to the packets in one way or another. For now it
simply acts as a sanity check and highlights where the delay is simply
ignored.
Since no time is added, all regressions remain the same.
This patch changes the names of the cache accessor functions to be in
line with those used by the ports. This is done to avoid confusion and
get closer to a one-to-one correspondence between the interface of the
memory object (the cache in this case) and the port itself.
The member function timingAccess has been split into a snoop/non-snoop
part to avoid branching on the isResponse() of the packet.
This patch changes the bus-related time accounting done in the packet
to be relative. Besides making it easier to align the cache timing to
cache clock cycles, it also makes it possible to create a Last-Level
Cache (LLC) directly to a memory controller without a bus inbetween.
The bus is unique in that it does not ever make the packets wait to
reflect the time spent forwarding them. Instead, the cache is
currently responsible for making the packets wait. Thus, the bus
annotates the packets with the time needed for the first word to
appear, and also the last word. The cache then delays the packets in
its queues before passing them on. It is worth noting that every
object attached to a bus (devices, memories, bridges, etc) should be
doing this if we opt for keeping this way of accounting for the bus
timing.
This patch removes the time field from the packet as it was only used
by the preftecher. Similar to the packet queue, the prefetcher now
wraps the packet in a deferred packet, which also has a tick
representing the absolute time when the packet should be sent.
This patch makes the clock member private to the ClockedObject and
forces all children to access it using clockPeriod(). This makes it
impossible to inadvertently change the clock, and also makes it easier
to transition to a situation where the clock is derived from e.g. a
clock domain, or through a multiplier.
This patch fixes a potential deadlock in the caches. This deadlock
could occur when more than one cache is used in a system, and
pkt->senderState is modified in between the two caches. This happened
as the caches relied on the senderState remaining unchanged, and used
it for instantaneous upstream communication with other caches.
This issue has been addressed by iterating over the linked list of
senderStates until we are either able to cast to a MSHR* or
senderState is NULL. If the cast is successful, we know that the
packet has previously passed through another cache, and therefore
update the downstreamPending flag accordingly. Otherwise, we do
nothing.
This patch adds a predecessor field to the SenderState base class to
make the process of linking them up more uniform, and enable a
traversal of the stack without knowing the specific type of the
subclasses.
There are a number of simplifications done as part of changing the
SenderState, particularly in the RubyTest.
This patch fixes a bug in the CommMonitor caused by the packet being
modified before it is captured in the trace. By recording the fields
before passing the packet on, and then putting these values in the
trace we ensure that even if the packet is modified the trace captures
what the CommMonitor saw.
This patch merely adopts a more strict use of const for the cache
member functions and variables, and also moves a large portion of the
member functions from public to protected.
Virtualized CPUs and the fastmem mode of the atomic CPU require direct
access to physical memory. We currently require caches to be disabled
when using them to prevent chaos. This is not ideal when switching
between hardware virutalized CPUs and other CPU models as it would
require a configuration change on each switch. This changeset
introduces a new version of the atomic memory mode,
'atomic_noncaching', where memory accesses are inserted into the
memory system as atomic accesses, but bypass caches.
To make memory mode tests cleaner, the following methods are added to
the System class:
* isAtomicMode() -- True if the memory mode is 'atomic' or 'direct'.
* isTimingMode() -- True if the memory mode is 'timing'.
* bypassCaches() -- True if caches should be bypassed.
The old getMemoryMode() and setMemoryMode() methods should never be
used from the C++ world anymore.
The transition for state MII and event Store was found missing during testing.
The transition is being added. The controller will not stall the Store request
in state MII
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.
This patch is as of now the final patch in the series of patches that replace
Time with Cycles.This patch further replaces Time with Cycles in Sequencer,
Profiler, different protocols and related entities.
Though Time has not been completely removed, the places where it is in use
seem benign as of now.
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.
This patch modifies the Histogram class' add() function so that it can add
linear histograms as well. The function assumes that the left end point of
the ranges of the two histograms are the same. It also assumes that when
the ranges of the two histogram are changed to accomodate an element not in
the range, the factor used in changing the range is same for both the
histograms.
This function is then used in removing one of the calls to the global
profiler*. The histograms for recording the delays incurred in processing
different requests are now maintained by the controllers. The profiler
adds these histograms when it needs to print the stats.
This patch does several things. First, the counter for fully busy cycles for a
controller is now kept with in the controller, instead of being part of the profiler.
Second, the topology class no longer keeps an array of controllers which was only
used for printing stats. Instead, ruby system will now ask each controller to print
the stats. Thirdly, the statistical variable for recording how many different types
were created is being moved in to the controller from the profiler. Note that for
printing, the profiler will collate results from different controllers.
The number of bits required for an address was set to floorLog2(memory size).
This is correct under the assumption that the memory size is a power of 2,
which is not always true. Hence, floorLog2 is being replaced with ceilLog2.
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.
This patch adds two additional scheduling constraints to the DRAM
controller model, to constrain the activation rate. The two metrics
are determine the size of the activation window in terms of the number
of activates and the minimum time required for that number of
activates. This maps to current DDRx, LPDDRx and WIOx standards that
have either tFAW (4 activate window) or tTAW (2 activate window)
scheduling constraints.
This patch changes how the data bus busy time is calculated such that
it is delayed to the actual scheduling time of the request as opposed
to being done as soon as possible.
This patch changes a bunch of statistics, and the stats update is
bundled together with the introruction of tFAW/tTAW and the named DRAM
configurations like DDR3 and LPDDR2.
the cache drainManager is set but never cleared, this is because
the cache itself does not need to be drained and thus never
triggers a signalDrainDone(). because the drainManager variable
is not used properly and does not appear to be necessary it has
been removed with this patch.
The panic() function already prints the current tick value. This call to
curCycle() is as such redundant. Since we are trying to move towards multiple
clock domains, this call will print misleading time.
This patch converts the panic() print outs in the Sequencer::wakeup()
call from ruby cycles to Ticks(). This makes it easier to debug deadlocks
with the ProtocolTrace flag so the issue time indicated in the panic message
can be quickly searched for.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch was initiated so as to remove reference to g_system_ptr,
the pointer to Ruby System that is used for getting the current time.
That simple change actual requires changing a lot many things in slicc and
garnet. All these changes are related to how time is handled.
In most of the places, g_system_ptr has been replaced by another clock
object. The changes have been done under the assumption that all the
components in the memory system are on the same clock frequency, but the
actual clocks might be distributed.
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.
The current implementation in gem5 just keeps a list of locks per cacheline.
Due to this, a store to a non-overlapping portion of the cacheline can cause an
LL/SC pair to fail. This patch simply adds an address range to the lock
structure, so that the lock is only invalidated if the store overlaps the lock
range.
Running with valgrind I noticed a use after free originating from
simple_mem.cc. It looks like this is a known issue and this additional call
site was missed in an earlier patch.
When the classic gem5 cache sees an uncacheable memory access, it used
to ignore it or silently drop the cache line in case of a
write. Normally, there shouldn't be any data in the cache belonging to
an uncacheable address range. However, since some architecture models
don't implement cache maintenance instructions, there might be some
dirty data in the cache that is discarded when this happens. The
reason it has mostly worked before is because such cache lines were
most likely evicted by normal memory activity before a TLB flush was
requested by the OS.
Previously, the cache model would invalidate cache lines when they
were accessed by an uncacheable write. This changeset alters this
behavior so all uncacheable memory accesses cause a cache flush with
an associated writeback if necessary. This is implemented by reusing
the cache flushing machinery used when draining the cache, which
implies that writebacks are performed using functional accesses.
The IIC replacement policy seems to be unused and has probably
gathered too much bit rot to be useful. This patch removes the IIC and
its associated cache parameters.
This patch adds basic merging of address ranges when determining which
address ranges should be reported in the configuration table. By
performing this merging it is possible to distribute an address range
across many memory channels (controllers). This is essential to enable
address interleaving.
This patch adds support for interleaving bits for the address
ranges. What was previously just a start and end address, now has an
additional three fields, for the high bit, and number of bits to use
for interleaving, and a match value to compare against. If the number
of interleaving bits is set to zero it is effectively disabled.
A number of convenience functions are added to the range to enquire
about the interleaving, its granularity and the number of stripes it
is part of.
This patch cleans up the AddrRangeMap in preparation for the addition
of interleaving by removing unused code. The non-const editions of
find are never used, and hence the duplication is not needed.
This patch tidies up a number of the bus DPRINTFs related to range
manipulation. In particular, it shifts the message about range changes
to the start of the member function, and also adds information about
when all ranges are received.
This patch makes the address mapper less stringent about checking the
before and after ranges, i.e. the original and remapped ranges. The
checks were not really necessary, and there are situations when the
previous checks were too strict.
This patch makes the start and end address private in a move to
prevent direct manipulation and matching of ranges based on these
fields. This is done so that a transition to ranges with interleaving
support is possible.
As a result of hiding the start and end, a number of member functions
are needed to perform the comparisons and manipulations that
previously took place directly on the members. An accessor function is
provided for the start address, and a function is added to test if an
address is within a range. As a result of the latter the != and ==
operator is also removed in favour of the member function. A member
function that returns a string representation is also created to allow
debug printing.
In general, this patch does not add any functionality, but it does
take us closer to a situation where interleaving (and more cleverness)
can be added under the bonnet without exposing it to the user. More on
that in a later patch.
This patch temporarily removes the joining of ranges when creating the
backing store, to reserve this functionality for the interleaved
ranges that are about to be introduced.
When creating the mmaps for the backing store, there is no point in
creating larger contigous chunks that what is necessary. The larger
chunks will only make life more difficult for the host.
Merging will be re-added later, but then only for interleaved ranges.
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 adds a basic check to ensure that the packet queue does not
grow absurdly large. The queue should only be used to store packets
that were delayed due to blocking from the neighbouring port, and not
for actual storage. Thus, a limit of 100 has been chosen for now
(which is already quite substantial).
This patch addresses a warning related to the swig interface
generation for the Switch class. The cxx_header is now specified
correctly, and the header in question has got a few includes added to
make it all compile.
This patch fixes a bug that caused multiple systems to overwrite each
other physical memory. The system name is now included in the filename
such that this is avoided.
The patch adds support to slicc for recognizing arguments that should be
passed to the constructor of a class. I did not like the fact that an explicit
check was being carried on the type 'TBETable' to figure out the arguments to
be passed to the constructor.
The patch also moves some of the member variables that are declared for all
the controllers to the base class AbstractController.
This patch adds a prefetcher for the ruby memory system. The prefetcher
is based on a prefetcher implemented by others (well, I don't know
who wrote the original). The prefetcher does stride-based prefetching,
both unit and non-unit. It obseves the misses in the cache and trains on
these. After the training period is over, the prefetcher starts issuing
prefetch requests to the controller.
This patch adds a _curTick variable to an eventq. This variable is updated
whenever an event is serviced in function serviceOne(), or all events upto
a particular time are processed in function serviceEvents(). This change
helps when there are eventqs that do not make use of curTick for scheduling
events.
Recent changes to functionalRead() in the memory system was not correct.
The change allowed for returning data from the first message found in
the buffers of the memory system. This is not correct since it is possible
that a timing message has data from an older state of the block.
The changes are being reverted.
This patch fixes the draining of the SimpleDRAM controller model. The
controller performs buffering of writes and normally there is no need
to ever empty the write buffer (if you have a fast on-chip memory,
then use it). The patch adds checks to ensure the write buffer is
drained when the controller is asked to do so.
This patch adds support to ruby so that the statistics maintained by ruby
are reset/dumped when the statistics for the rest of the system are
reset/dumped. For resetting the statistics, ruby now provides the
resetStats() function that a sim object can provide. As a consequence, the
clearStats() function has been removed from RubySystem. For dumping stats,
Ruby now adds a callback event to the dumpStatsQueue. The exit callback that
ruby used to add earlier is being removed.
Created by: Hamid Reza Khaleghzadeh.
Improved by: Lluc Alvarez, Nilay Vaish
Committed by: Nilay Vaish
This patch adds support for the following optional drain methods in
the classical memory system's cache model:
memWriteback() - Write back all dirty cache lines to memory using
functional accesses.
memInvalidate() - Invalidate all cache lines. Dirty cache lines
are lost unless a writeback is requested.
Since memWriteback() is called when checkpointing systems, this patch
adds support for checkpointing systems with caches. The serialization
code now checks whether there are any dirty lines in the cache. If
there are dirty lines in the cache, the checkpoint is flagged as bad
and a warning is printed.
This patch moves the draining interface from SimObject to a separate
class that can be used by any object needing draining. However,
objects not visible to the Python code (i.e., objects not deriving
from SimObject) still depend on their parents informing them when to
drain. This patch also gets rid of the CountedDrainEvent (which isn't
really an event) and replaces it with a DrainManager.
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.
This patch enables dumping statistics and Linux process information on
context switch boundaries (__switch_to() calls) that are used for
Streamline integration (a graphical statistics viewer from ARM).
This patch changes the default system clock from 1THz to 1GHz. This
clock is used by all modules that do not override the default (parent
clock), and primarily affects the IO subsystem. Every DMA device uses
its clock to schedule the next transfer, and the change will thus
cause this inter-transfer delay to be longer.
The default clock of the bus is removed, as the clock inherited from
the system provides exactly the same value.
A follow-on patch will bump the stats.
I had forgotten to change the network test protocol while making changes to
ruby for supporting functional accesses. This patch updates the protocol so
that it can compile correctly.
This patch adds support to different entities in the ruby memory system
for more reliable functional read/write accesses. Only the simple network
has been augmented as of now. Later on Garnet will also support functional
accesses.
The patch adds functional access code to all the different types of messages
that protocols can send around. These messages are functionally accessed
by going through the buffers maintained by the network entities.
The patch also rectifies some of the bugs found in coherence protocols while
testing the patch.
With this patch applied, functional writes always succeed. But functional
reads can still fail.
Currently the Ruby System maintains pointer to only one of the memory
controllers. But there can be multiple controllers in the system. This
patch adds a vector of memory controllers.
This patch adds support for function definitions to appear in slicc structs.
This is required for supporting functional accesses for different types of
messages. Subsequent patches will use this to development.
It seems unecessary that the BankedArray class needs to schedule an event
to figure out when the access ends. Instead only the time for the end of access
needs to be tracked.
Ruby system was recently converted to a clocked object. Such objects maintain
state related to the time that has passed so far. During the cache warmup, Ruby
system changes its own time and the global time. Later on, the global time is
restored. So Ruby system also needs to reset its own time.
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 moves all the memory backing store operations from the
independent memory controllers to the global physical memory. The main
reason for this patch is to allow address striping in a future set of
patches, but at this point it already provides some useful
functionality in that it is now possible to change the number of
memory controllers and their address mapping in combination with
checkpointing. Thus, the host and guest view of the memory backing
store are now completely separate.
With this patch, the individual memory controllers are far simpler as
all responsibility for serializing/unserializing is moved to the
physical memory. Currently, the functionality is more or less moved
from AbstractMemory to PhysicalMemory without any major
changes. However, in a future patch the physical memory will also
resolve any ranges that are interleaved and properly assign the
backing store to the memory controllers, and keep the host memory as a
single contigous chunk per address range.
Functionality for future extensions which involve CPU virtualization
also enable the host to get pointers to the backing store.
This patch changes the data structure used to keep track of ports that
should be told to retry. As the bus is doing this in an FCFS way,
there is no point having a list. A deque is a better match (and is at
least in theory a better choice from a performance point of view).
This patch addresses a number of smaller issues identified by the code
inspection utility cppcheck. There are a number of identified leaks in
the arm/linux/system.cc (although the function only get's called once
so it is not a major problem), a few deletes in dev/x86/i8042.cc that
were not array deletes, and sprintfs where the character array had one
element less than needed. In the IIC tags there was a function
allocating an array of longs which is in fact never used.
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 transitions the bus to use the AddrRange operations instead
of directly accessing the start and end. The change facilitates the
move to a more elaborate AddrRange class that also supports address
striping in the bus by specifying interleaving bits in the ranges.
Two new functions are added to the AddrRange to determine if two
ranges intersect, and if one is a subset of another. The bus
propagation of address ranges is also tweaked such that an update is
only propagated if the bus received information from all the
downstream slave modules. This avoids the iteration and need for the
cycle-breaking scheme that was previously used.
This patch moves the block size computation from findBlockSize to
initialisation time, once all the neighbouring ports are connected.
There is no need to dynamically update the block size, and the caching
of the value effectively avoided that anyhow. This is very similar to
what was already in place, just with a slightly leaner implementation.
This patch removes the parts of slicc that were required for multi-chip
protocols. Going ahead, it seems multi-chip protocols would be implemented
by playing with the network itself.
This patch moves the code for functional accesses to ruby system. This is
because the subsequent patches add support for making functional accesses
to the messages in the interconnect. Making those accesses from the ruby port
would be cumbersome.
In the current caches the hit latency is paid twice on a miss. This patch lets
a configurable response latency be set of the cache for the backward path.
Fix the drain functionality of the RubyPort to only call drain on child ports
during a system-wide drain process, instead of calling each time that a
ruby_hit_callback is executed.
This fixes the issue of the RubyPort ports being reawakened during the drain
simulation, possibly with work they didn't previously have to complete. If
they have new work, they may call process on the drain event that they had
not registered work for, causing an assertion failure when completing the
drain event.
Also, in RubyPort, set the drainEvent to NULL when there are no events
to be drained. If not set to NULL, the drain loop can result in stale
drainEvents used.
This patch introduces a high-level model of a DRAM controller, with a
basic read/write buffer structure, a selectable and customisable
arbiter, a few address mapping options, and the basic DRAM timing
constraints. The parameters make it possible to turn this model into
any desired DDRx/LPDDRx/WideIOx memory controller.
The intention is not to be cycle accurate or capture every aspect of a
DDR DRAM interface, but rather to enable exploring of the high-level
knobs with a good simulation speed. Thus, contrary to e.g. DRAMSim
this module emphasizes simulation speed with a good-enough accuracy.
This module is merely a starting point, and there are plenty additions
and improvements to come. A notable addition is the support for
address-striping in the bus to enable a multi-channel DRAM
controller. Also note that there are still a few "todo's" in the code
base that will be addressed as we go along.
A follow-up patch will add basic performance regressions that use the
traffic generator to exercise a few well-defined corner cases.
This patch removes the unused file parameter from the
AbstractMemory. The patch serves to make it easier to transition to a
separation of the actual contigious host memory backing store, and the
gem5 memory controllers.
Without the file parameter it becomes easier to hide the creation of
the mmap in the PhysicalMemory, as there are no longer any reasons to
expose the actual contigious ranges to the user.
To the best of my knowledge there is no use of the parameter, so the
change should not affect anyone.
This patch takes the final plunge and transitions from the templated
Range class to the more specific AddrRange. In doing so it changes the
obvious Range<Addr> to AddrRange, and also bumps the range_map to be
AddrRangeMap.
In addition to the obvious changes, including the removal of redundant
includes, this patch also does some house keeping in preparing for the
introduction of address interleaving support in the ranges. The Range
class is also stripped of all the functionality that is never used.
--HG--
rename : src/base/range.hh => src/base/addr_range.hh
rename : src/base/range_map.hh => src/base/addr_range_map.hh
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 makes a minor addition to the SimpleMemory by enforcing a
maximum data rate. The bandwidth is configurable, and a reasonable
value (12.8GB/s) has been choosen as the default.
The changes do add some complexity to the SimpleMemory, but they
should definitely be justifiable as this enables a far more realistic
setup using even this simple memory controller.
The rate regulation is done for reads and writes combined to reflect
the bidirectional data busses used by most (if not all) relevant
memories. Moreover, the regulation is done per packet as opposed to
long term, as it is the short term data rate (data bus width times
frequency) that is the limiting factor.
A follow-up patch bumps the stats for the regressions.
This patch shifts the version of gcc for which we enable c++0x from
4.6 to 4.4 The more long term plan is to see what the c++0x features
can bring and what level of support would be enabled simply by bumping
the required version of gcc from 4.3 to 4.4.
A few minor things had to be fixed in the code base, most notably the
choice of a hashmap implementation. In the Ruby Sequencer there were
also a few minor issues that gcc 4.4 was not too happy about.
This patch addresses a few minor issues reported by the clang static
analyzer.
The analysis was run with:
scan-build -disable-checker deadcode \
-enable-checker experimental.core \
-disable-checker experimental.core.CastToStruct \
-enable-checker experimental.cpluscplus
This seperates the functionality to clear the state in a block into
blk.hh and the functionality to udpate the tag information into the
tags. This gets rid of the case where calling invalidateBlk on an
already-invalid block does something different than calling it on a
valid block, which was confusing.
If I understand correctly, this was put in place so that a debugger can be
attached when the protocol aborts. While this sounds useful, it is a problem
when the simulation is not being actively monitored. I think it is better to
remove this.
Despite gzwrite taking an unsigned for length, it returns an int for
bytes written; gzwrite fails if (int)len < 0. Because of this, call
gzwrite with len no larger than INT_MAX: write in blocks of INT_MAX if
data to be written is larger than INT_MAX.
This patch is a first step to using Cycles as a parameter type. The
main affected modules are the CPUs and the Ruby caches. There are
definitely plenty more places that are affected, but this patch serves
as a starting point to making the transition.
An important part of this patch is to actually enable parameters to be
specified as Param.Cycles which involves some changes to params.py.
The =operator for the DataBlock class was incorrectly interpreting the class
member m_alloc. This variable stands for whether the assigned memory for the
data block needs to be freed or not by the class itself. It seems that the
=operator interpreted the variable as whether the memory is assigned to the
data block. This wrong interpretation was causing values not to propagate
to RubySystem::m_mem_vec_ptr. This caused major issues with restoring from
checkpoints when using a protocol which verified that the cache data was
consistent with the backing store (i.e. MOESI-hammer).
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.
This patch tightens up the semantics around port binding and checks
that the ports that are being bound are currently not connected, and
similarly connected before unbind is called.
The patch consequently also changes the order of the unbind and bind
for the switching of CPUs to ensure that the rules are adhered
to. Previously the ports would be "over-written" without any check.
There are no changes in behaviour due to this patch, and the only
place where the unbind functionality is used is in the CPU.
The memory size variable was a 32-bit int. This meant that the size of the
memory was limited to 4GB. This patch changes the type of the variable to
64-bit to support larger memory sizes. Thanks to Raghuraman Balasubramanian
for bringing this to notice.
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 removes the NACKing in the bridge, as the split
request/response busses now ensure that protocol deadlocks do not
occur, i.e. the message-dependency chain is broken by always allowing
responses to make progress without being stalled by requests. The
NACKs had limited support in the system with most components ignoring
their use (with a suitable call to panic), and as the NACKs are no
longer needed to avoid protocol deadlocks, the cleanest way is to
simply remove them.
The bridge is the starting point as this is the only place where the
NACKs are created. A follow-up patch will remove the code that deals
with NACKs in the endpoints, e.g. the X86 table walker and DMA
port. Ultimately the type of packet can be complete removed (until
someone sees a need for modelling more complex protocols, which can
now be done in parts of the system since the port and interface is
split).
As a consequence of the NACK removal, the bridge now has to send a
retry to a master if the request or response queue was full on the
first attempt. This change also makes the bridge ports very similar to
QueuedPorts, and a later patch will change the bridge to use these. A
first step in this direction is taken by aligning the name of the
member functions, as done by this patch.
A bit of tidying up has also been done as part of the simplifications.
Surprisingly, this patch has no impact on any of the
regressions. Hence, there was never any NACKs issued. In a follow-up
patch I would suggest changing the size of the bridge buffers set in
FSConfig.py to also test the situation where the bridge fills up.
This patch extends the queued port interfaces with methods for
scheduling the transmission of a timing request/response. The methods
are named similar to the corresponding sendTiming(Snoop)Req/Resp,
replacing the "send" with "sched". As the queues are currently
unbounded, the methods always succeed and hence do not return a value.
This functionality was previously provided in the subclasses by
calling PacketQueue::schedSendTiming with the appropriate
parameters. With this change, there is no need to introduce these
extra methods in the subclasses, and the use of the queued interface
is more uniform and explicit.
This patch allows packets to be enqueued in the same tick as they are
intended to be sent. This does not imply they actually are sent that
tick, although that is possible.
This change is useful for module that use the queued ports primarly to
avoid handling the flow control involved in sending and retrying
packets.
This patch moves the clock of the CPU, bus, and numerous devices to
the new class ClockedObject, that sits in between the SimObject and
MemObject in the class hierarchy. Although there are currently a fair
amount of MemObjects that do not make use of the clock, they
potentially should do so, e.g. the caches should at some point have
the same clock as the CPU, potentially with a 1:n ratio. This patch
does not introduce any new clock objects or object hierarchies
(clusters, clock domains etc), but is still a step in the direction of
having a more structured approach clock domains.
The most contentious part of this patch is the serialisation of clocks
that some of the modules (but not all) did previously. This
serialisation should not be needed as the clock is set through the
parameters even when restoring from the checkpoint. In other words,
the state is "stored" in the Python code that creates the modules.
The nextCycle methods are also simplified and the clock phase
parameter of the CPU is removed (this could be part of a clock object
once they are introduced).
