The introduction of parallel event queues added most of the support
needed to run multiple VMs (systems) within the same gem5
instance. This changeset fixes up signal delivery so that KVM's
control signals are delivered to the thread that executes the CPU's
event queue. Specifically:
* Timers and counters are now initialized from a separate method
(startupThread) that is scheduled as the first event in the
thread-specific event queue. This ensures that they are
initialized from the thread that is going to execute the CPUs
event queue and enables signal delivery to the right thread when
exiting from KVM.
* The POSIX-timer-based KVM timer (used to force exits from KVM) has
been updated to deliver signals to the thread that's executing KVM
instead of the process (thread is undefined in that case). This
assumes that the timer is instantiated from the thread that is
going to execute the KVM vCPU.
* Signal masking is now done using pthread_sigmask instead of
sigprocmask. The behavior of the latter is undefined in threaded
applications.
* Since signal masks can be inherited, make sure to actively unmask
the control signals when setting up the KVM signal mask.
There are currently no facilities to multiplex between multiple KVM
CPUs in the same event queue, we are therefore limited to
configurations where there is only one KVM CPU per event queue. In
practice, this means that multi-system configurations can be
simulated, but not multiple CPUs in a shared-memory configuration.
Modifies FSConfig.py to enable ARMv8 compatibility.
To boot gem5 with ARMv8:
Download the v8 kernel, .dtb file, and root FS from: http://gem5.org/Download
Download the ARMv8 toolchain, and add the bin dir to your path:
http://www.linaro.org/engineering/engineering-projects/armv8
Build gem5 for ARM
Build the v8 bootloader (in gem5/system/arm/aarch64_bootloader)
Make script in gem5/system/arm/aarch64_bootloader will require v8 toolchain,
drop the produced boot_emm.arm64 in $(M5_PATH)/binaries/
Run:
$ build/ARM/gem5.fast configs/example/fs.py --machine-type=VExpress_EMM64 \
--kernel=/path/to/kernel/vmlinux-linaro-tracking \
--dtb-filename=/path/to/dtb/rtsm_ve-aemv8a.dtb \
--disk-image=/path/to/img/linaro-minimal-armv8.img
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 enbles use of the basic PIO devices as part of the NULL
build. Although it might seem counter intuitive to have a PIO device
without being able to execute a driver, this change enables us to
break a device class hierarchy into an ISA-agnostic part, and an
ISA-specific part, without requiring multiple-inheritance. The
ISA-agnostic base class is a PIO device, but does not make use of the
port.
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.
This changesets adds branch predictor support to the
BaseSimpleCPU. The simple CPUs normally don't need a branch predictor,
however, there are at least two cases where it can be desirable:
1) A simple CPU can be used to warm the branch predictor of an O3
CPU before switching to the slower O3 model.
2) The simple CPU can be used as a quick way of evaluating/debugging
new branch predictors since it exposes branch predictor
statistics.
Limitations:
* Since the simple CPU doesn't speculate, only one instruction will
be active in the branch predictor at a time (i.e., the branch
predictor will never see speculative branches).
* The outcome of a branch prediction does not affect the performance
of the simple CPU.
Currently fatal() ends the simulation in a normal fashion. This results in
the call stack getting lost when using a debugger and it is not always
possible to debug the simulation just from the information provided by the
printed error message. Even though the error is likely due to a user's fault,
the information available should not be thrown away. Hence, this patch to
call abort() from fatal().
Changeset 7274310be1bb (isa: clean up register constants) increased
the value of NumFloatRegs, which triggered a bug in
X86ISA::copyRegs(). This bug is caused by the x87 stack being copied
twice since register indexes past NUM_FLOATREGS are mapped into the
x87 stack relative to the top of the stack, which is undefined when
the copy takes place.
This changeset updates the copyRegs() function to use access registers
using the non-flattening interface, which guarantees that undesirable
register folding does not happen.
The getRFlags and setRFlags utility functions were not updated
correctly when condition registers were separated into their own
register class. This lead to incorrect state transfer in calls from
kvm into the simulator (e.g., m5 readfile ended up in an infinite
loop) and when switching CPUs. This patch makes these utility
functions use getCCReg and setCCReg instead of getIntReg and setIntReg
which read and write the integer registers.
Reviewed-by: Andreas Sandberg <andreas@sandberg.pp.se>
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).
gem5 makes the incorrect assumption that by binding a socket, it
effectively has allocated a port. Linux only allocates ports once you call
listen on the given socket, not when you call bind. So even if the port was
free when bind was called, another process (gem5 instance) could race in
between the bind & listen calls and steal the port. In the current code, if
the call to bind fails due to the port being in use (EADDRINUSE), gem5 retries
for a different port. However if listen fails, gem5 just panics. The fix is
testing the return value of listen and re-trying if it was due to EADDRINUSE.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
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>
Note: AArch64 and AArch32 interworking is not supported. If you use an AArch64
kernel you are restricted to AArch64 user-mode binaries. This will be addressed
in a later patch.
Note: Virtualization is only supported in AArch32 mode. This will also be fixed
in a later patch.
Contributors:
Giacomo Gabrielli (TrustZone, LPAE, system-level AArch64, AArch64 NEON, validation)
Thomas Grocutt (AArch32 Virtualization, AArch64 FP, validation)
Mbou Eyole (AArch64 NEON, validation)
Ali Saidi (AArch64 Linux support, code integration, validation)
Edmund Grimley-Evans (AArch64 FP)
William Wang (AArch64 Linux support)
Rene De Jong (AArch64 Linux support, performance opt.)
Matt Horsnell (AArch64 MP, validation)
Matt Evans (device models, code integration, validation)
Chris Adeniyi-Jones (AArch64 syscall-emulation)
Prakash Ramrakhyani (validation)
Dam Sunwoo (validation)
Chander Sudanthi (validation)
Stephan Diestelhorst (validation)
Andreas Hansson (code integration, performance opt.)
Eric Van Hensbergen (performance opt.)
Gabe Black
The CheckerCPU model in pre-v8 code was not checking the
updates to miscellaneous registers due to some methods
for setting misc regs were not instrumented. The v8 patches
exposed this by calling the instrumented misc reg update
methods and then invoking the checker before the main CPU had
updated its misc regs, leading to false positives about
register mismatches. This patch fixes the non-instrumented
misc reg update methods and places calls to the checker in
the proper places in the O3 model.
With ARMv8 support the same misc register id results in accessing different
registers depending on the current mode of the processor. This patch adds
the same orthogonality to the misc register file as the others (int, float, cc).
For all the othre ISAs this is currently a null-implementation.
Additionally, a system variable is added to all the ISA objects.
This patch add support for generating wake-up events in the CPU when an address
that is currently in the exclusive state is hit by a snoop. This mechanism is required
for ARMv8 multi-processor support.
Previously we were casting the result type to the the memory type which
is incorrect for things like dual-memory operations which still return a
single result.
