M5 skips over any simulated time where it doesn't have any work to do. When
the simulation is active, the time skipped is short and the work done at any
point in time is relatively substantial. If the time between events is long
and/or the work to do at each event is small, it's possible for simulated time
to pass faster than real time. When running a benchmark that can be good
because it means the simulation will finish sooner in real time. When
interacting with the real world through, for instance, a serial terminal or
bridge to a real network, this can be a problem. Human or network response time
could be greatly exagerated from the perspective of the simulation and make
simulated events happen "too soon" from an external perspective.
This change adds the capability to force the simulation to run no faster than
real time. It does so by scheduling a periodic event that checks to see if
its simulated period is shorter than its real period. If it is, it stalls the
simulation until they're equal. This is called time syncing.
A future change could add pseudo instructions which turn time syncing on and
off from within the simulation. That would allow time syncing to be used for
the interactive parts of a session but then turned off when running a
benchmark using the m5 utility program inside a script. Time syncing would
probably not happen anyway while running a benchmark because there would be
plenty of work for M5 to do, but the event overhead could be avoided.
Start by turning all of the *Source functions into classes
so we can do more calculations and more easily collect the data we need.
Add parameters to the new classes for indicating what sorts of flags the
objects should be compiled with so we can allow certain files to be compiled
without Werror for example.
This should allow m5 to be more easily embedded into other simulators.
The m5 binary adds a simple main function which then calls into the m5
libarary to start the simulation. In order to make this work
correctly, it was necessary embed python code directly into the
library instead of the zipfile hack. This is because you can't just
append the zipfile to the end of a library the way you can a binary.
As a result, Python files that are part of the m5 simulator are now
compile, marshalled, compressed, and then inserted into the library's
data section with a certain symbol name. Additionally, a new Importer
was needed to allow python to get at the embedded python code.
Small additional changes include:
- Get rid of the PYTHONHOME stuff since I don't think anyone ever used
it, and it just confuses things. Easy enough to add back if I'm wrong.
- Create a few new functions that are key to initializing and running
the simulator: initSignals, initM5Python, m5Main.
The original code for creating libm5 was inspired by a patch Michael
Adler, though the code here was done by me.
Move the argument files to src/sim and add a utility.cc file with a function
getArguments() that returns the given argument in the architecture specific fashion.
getArguments() was getArg() is the architecture specific Argument class and has had
all magic numbers replaced with meaningful constants. Also add a function to the
Argument class for testing if an argument is NULL.
--HG--
rename : src/arch/alpha/arguments.cc => src/sim/arguments.cc
rename : src/arch/alpha/arguments.hh => src/sim/arguments.hh
extra : convert_revision : 8b93667bafaa03b52aadb64d669adfe835266b8e
creation and initialization now happens in python. Parameter objects
are generated and initialized by python. The .ini file is now solely for
debugging purposes and is not used in construction of the objects in any
way.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 7e722873e417cb3d696f2e34c35ff488b7bff4ed
automatic. The point is that now a subdirectory can be added
to the build process just by creating a SConscript file in it.
The process has two passes. On the first pass, all subdirs
of the root of the tree are searched for SConsopts files.
These files contain any command line options that ought to be
added for a particular subdirectory. On the second pass,
all subdirs of the src directory are searched for SConscript
files. These files describe how to build any given subdirectory.
I have added a Source() function. Any file (relative to the
directory in which the SConscript resides) passed to that
function is added to the build. Clean up everything to take
advantage of Source().
function is added to the list of files to be built.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 103f6b490d2eb224436688c89cdc015211c4fd30
