The namespace Message conflicts with the Message data type used extensively
in Ruby. Since Ruby is being moved to the same Master/Slave ports based
configuration style as the rest of gem5, this conflict needs to be resolved.
Hence, the namespace is being renamed to ProtoMessage.
This patch changes the decode script to output the optional fields of
the proto message Packet, namely id and flags. The flags field is set
by the communication monitor.
The id field is useful for CPU trace experiments, e.g. linking the
fetch side to decode side. It had to be renamed because it clashes
with a built in python function id() for getting the "identity" of an
object.
This patch also takes a few common function definitions out from the
multiple scripts and adds them to a protolib python module.
This patch changes how the streams are created to avoid the size
limitation on the coded streams. As we only read/write a single
message at a time, there is never any message larger than a few
bytes. However, the coded stream eventually complains that its
internal counter reaches 64+ MByte if the total file size exceeds this
value.
Based on suggestions in the protobuf discussion forums, the coded
stream is now created for every message that is read/written. The
result is that the internal byte count never goes about tens of bytes,
and we can read/write any size file that the underlying file I/O can
handle.
This patch adds an optional generic 64-bit identifier field to the
packet trace. This can be used to store the sequential number of the
instruction that gave rise to the packet, thread id, master id,
"sub"-master within a larger module etc. As the field is optional it
has a marginal cost if not used.
This patch adds an optional flags field to the packet trace to encode
the request flags that contain information about whether the request
is (un)cacheable, instruction fetch, preftech etc.
This patch adds support for inputting protobuf messages through a
ProtoInputStream which hides the internal streams used by the
library. The stream is created based on the name of an input file and
optionally includes decompression using gzip.
The input stream will start by getting a magic number from the file,
and also verify that it matches with the expected value. Once opened,
messages can be read incrementally from the stream, returning
true/false until an error occurs or the end of the file is reached.
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 support for outputting protobuf messages through a
ProtoOutputStream which hides the internal streams used by the
library. The stream is created based on the name of an output file and
optionally includes compression using gzip.
The output stream will start by putting a magic number in the file,
and then for every message that is serialized prepend the size such
that the stream can be written and read incrementally. At this point
this merely serves as a proof of concept.
